Carpeting has evolved from wall-to-wall carpeting in every room of your home. There are many new carpet materials that are very eco-friendly.
Carpet is great for rooms where the family hangs out, like a tv room where people are done on the floor a lot. It’s also great for bedrooms where your feet hit the carpet that’s warm underfoot.
You can use carpet padding to turn a concrete subfloor in a basement into a comfortable playroom. Carpet installed in your mud room ensures that the dirt stays there, and is easy to vacuum up.
What’s New in Carpeting
Today’s modern carpeting comes in a variety of colors, textures, patterns, and materials to meet the needs of homeowners.
Carpet tiles are useful for highly trafficked areas that could easily get water damaged. The tile can be removed and replaced if it gets stained.
Carpet even comes in planks like luxury vinyl planks (LVP). You can create a herringbone pattern using the carpet planks, providing a modern look.
Carpet tiles and carpet planks are short tiles and are easy to maintain. You can also use them outdoors as part of your patio area for a fun look under the furniture. And you can blend them in with wood or tile flooring to look like a rug or carpet runner.
And you can do color blocking with tiles and planks to provide a uniquely colorful experience.
10 Reasons to Select Carpeting for Your Home
Carpet can fit into your home design along with wood flooring and tile. Carpeting a specific room in your house might be the perfect solution if you are looking for any of these benefits:
- Improves the feeling of warmth and coziness within a room
- Excellent for creating a fun room like roads or a gridiron
- Enhanced insulation against drafts in your home
- Increased soundproofing or sound reduction
- An overall budget-friendly option for flooring
- Vibrant colors, textures, patterns, and shades to match any color design
- Carpeting tile options that are easy for DIYers to tackle
- Improved stain-resistant flooring options is great for homes with pets
- Extremely eco-friendly: Made from all-natural fibers and non-toxic dyes
- Vast selection of design options: Textures, prints, looped, sisal, shag, and more
Fibers Used in Carpeting
A new trend in carpet fibers is recycled plastic bottles. It’s very eco-friendly and keeps plastic from ending up in the ocean. The fiber is soft and comfortable under your feet.
Modern fibers are also becoming more stain-resistant. So when you spill punch or orange soda, it won’t stain.
There is also plant-based carpeting made from jute and sisal. Jute is quite absorbent and can stain more easily, so you want to avoid putting it where it can get wet or stained.
Carpet is also still being made from cotton or wool fibers as well.
Things to Consider When Choosing Flooring
To make the best match with your family, lifestyle, personal tastes and flooring placement it makes sense to first take a look at these questions. Answer them with your flooring specialist, so you not only select the most appealing floor for your room but also the one that will best meet your needs over the lifespan you are in your home.
- How much traffic will this area get?
- Will there be pets and kids in this space?
- How much dirt will be tracked here?
- How often will cleaning be needed?
- How moist is this space?
- How do you plan on living in this space most of the time?
- How long do you intend on staying in this home?
Is Carpeting Green?
Modern carpets are eco-friendly. Major companies have changed the manufacturing process to ensure that the carpets are non-toxic and 100% biodegradable.
It used to be carpets had a lot of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are emitted as gases. When carpet was installed, you’d need to wait a certain period of time before spending a lot of time near it while it was “off-gassing.”
You have many more options now. You can choose carpets and carpet pads that don’t have rubber or latex. And you can work with your flooring specialist to have low-emitting non-solvent adhesive used instead of traditional glue.
Pros of Carpeting
The main benefit of carpeted floors is that it is soft underfoot and warmer under your bare feet, especially in the winter months. This can be a great choice for bedrooms and some kid’s playrooms, especially if the carpet is in a child’s color.
Carpeting won’t show scratches or marks like hardwood or laminate can.
If you have a lot of kids running around, carpeting is great for absorbing noise compared to hardwood floors. It’s also highly recommended for basements for noise as well as providing padding. If the kids or pets are roughhousing, it’s nice to be able to land on a padded surface rather than on the hard concrete floor.
Choosing Your Carpet
When evaluating carpeting, you may want to consider neutrals in large rooms where you want the walls or furniture to provide the pop of color. You can also choose highly textured carpet to enhance the room.
Very busy patterns and bright colors are great for hallways and staircases. You want to put this type of carpet in smaller areas.
Have fun designing your home. And, if you need a bit more inspiration, check out this video:
