Decorating around existing carpets

[WittgensteinsBunny]

We're possibly buying a beautiful, quite big Edwardian house. It's a big stretch financially but we reckon we'll be there for a very long time so decorating / improvements can be done slowly - the decor is not a deal breaker for us. It's been maintained really well meaning that we can live there without needing to do anything, it's just not to our taste. We'll need to buy some furniture, so that's where we'll have to spend the bulk of money. The carpets are (mostly) really good quality and in immaculate condition but are bold colours... the hallway is beautiful parquet flooring but the stairs and landing are navy / royal blue. The front room carpet is pale green. The family room is yellow. We may consider taking the carpet up in the front room and sanding the boards as they've done in the dining room. This would suit us better as we have 2 preschoolers and I really don't like the green carpet. But the carpet on the stairs / landing will have to stay for now. I'm not interested in painting the stairs or having wooden floors upstairs. So, any ideas of colours / styles to modernise?

We have a similar thing in our Edwardian house - the carpets are clearly good quality though not really our thing. We are putting Egyptian Cotton with the dark red hall, stairs and landing carpet for example. We have a similar sounding blue carpet in our bedroom and are using Almond White and a pale blue in the room. A pale grey could be really striking with the yellow carpet.

Ooh, that's a great idea. I love the idea of pale grey and yellow. I've been looking at my F&B chart and cornforth white with the navy could be good too.

I think it sounds very mismatched throughout the house and forking out for F&B paint isn't going to make it any better. I'd seriously consider changing the carpet - if it's in good condition, then presumably you could keep the underlay and grippers. To save further, you could move furniture out yourself so that a carpet fitter only needs to take the old carpet and put the new one down. I think that the expense for one room could as well be not much more then a few pots of F&B paint for the same area.

Ha - all very well JoJo but if the OP's room dimensions are anything like ours, we certainly don't have the money to rip out and replace perfectly good carpets rather than work with them. In our case we are spending a lot sorting out the kitchen and dining room. Carpets can wait.

We binned one carpet which had faded and was marked. We were lucky enough to find parquet flooring under that carpet and restoring the floor was a third the cost of recarpeting.

We've in a similar position and just brought a house covered in Axminster. We've got a few years of renovations and decorating to do, so we're keeping them for now. We've taken the patterned wall paper down and painted most offensive walls in neutral colours which has toned it down a lot, and it is totally liveable for a year or so.**
Once our furniture was in there (a mixture of Victorian, mid century and modern), our pictures on the wall etc it looks loads better and quite quirky!

We've also got to re-plaster, and rip out a few fitted wardrobes and bathrooms, so no point forking out for new carpets until that's done, in case they get trashed.
Also agree with wowfudge . Our rooms are huge, and the existing carpets are excellent quality. They will need to be replaced with similar spec that will last years, I'm not 100% sure how I'm decorating it yet and I can't afford to make a mistake by buying in haste.

Apologies for the excessive bold type there