Cream Carpet Dilemma

Every house has a breaking point.
Ours happens to be cream carpet.

Over the years, I’ve learned there are two kinds of home stories: the ones you plan to tell, and the ones that show up uninvited—usually with stains. When you live long enough in one place, the floor becomes a quiet witness. It records everything.

Which is how I landed here, thinking about carpet disasters—because of course that’s where this story goes.

Burns.
Spills.
Pets.
Kids.
Wine.

That moment when you know: Yep. That carpet’s done.

When we built our house about twenty years ago, hardwood covered the main part of the home. Cream carpet filled the library, dining room, and three bedrooms. Now you probably already know…Cream carpet is unforgiving.
The one truth about cream carpet, though, is that it never surprises you. It’s either clean…or filthy.

And over the years, ours has been everything but clean.

It soaked up puke (Michelle and the red wine incident), repeated dog pee (dogs—plural—over the years), burns from Christmas lights falling out of the windows, paint splatters from Luka and Kadon, and spills of every imaginable kind.

A few weeks ago, I brought a sweet treat to our Sidetracked Sisters meeting. Grasshoppers seemed fun. After the meeting, I brought the bottle of crème de menthe home and forgot it—still in the black grocery bag—on a chair in the dining room.

The next day, while I was out of the house, one of my grands opened the bottle and dumped most of the remaining contents directly onto the carpet.

Green.
Bright.
Unapologetic green.

I borrowed my aunt’s steam cleaner and worked and worked to get the color out. But green doesn’t ever come all the way out. Craig told me not to worry. With the holidays approaching, we would flip the living room and dining room anyway. The sofa would soon cover the neon glow. After the holidays, we could rip out the carpet.

But that’s where the real dilemma begins.

What comes next?

Craig wants to tile the room—large tiles, maybe eighteen inches—coordinated with the oak flooring and the golden-retriever-proof kitchen tiles. He imagines laying them at an angle. Maybe with a pattern.

I want a consistent flow of wood throughout the main floor. Rugs to soften the space. Rugs to define where we sit and gather.

This story isn’t finished yet. Homes, like families, keep evolving. As of this writing, only Kadon’s bedroom, the master bedroom, and the dining room still have carpet. You see, Some things get replaced because they’re worn out. Others because we’re ready for something different. What we choose to replace—and what we choose to live with a little longer—says as much about who we are now as it does about where we’ve been.

For the moment, the carpet stays. A little worn. A little stained. Still holding the shape of the stories that showed up uninvited. 

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