Carpets- how to pick them

[beereyt]

Any advice much appreciated. We are thinking of a striped on on stairs and landing and grey in bedrooms. But so many types- hard to know. Made a bad choice previously (even though it was expensive) and hated it for last 10 years!

Polypropylene carpets are widely available and lots of people love them, but I prefer wool - wears well and keeps its looks. For stairs 80:20 mix wool:synthetic is hard wearing. Carpets come in different weights so buy the heaviest weight you can afford. Bedrooms aren't high traffic areas so you needn't spend as much there.

Have what you like. That said, stripy stair carpets were really popular a few years ago and grey must surely be on the way out now?

Agree with PP. It depends how much wear you want and how long you intend to stay in the house. Wool - 80/20 - is the best , doesn't attract the dirt as much as synthetic fibres. But you would expect to pay somewhere like £30-£40 a metre for quality carpet, plus underlay (about £8 a metre) .

In bedrooms you can go cheaper and consider synthetics, but they do attract fluff/dust more and the pile flattens down easily.

We bought really good quality for our downstairs - all done in the same cream berber twist - which has worn really well and been down for around 15 years to date. we do have a shoes-off rule!

Upstairs we used synthetics in kids rooms and this has been replaced since.

Thanks for advice. I think i wanted mew carpets since stripes and greys were popular so hard to consider others now!

We always go for 80% wool, 20% nylon. Wool is soft underfoot and easy to clean. It's worth splashing out for good quality underlay. It makes all the difference.

A 'heather' type twist is often more practical than a plain smooth-cut pile.

Polypropylene is everywhere in the shops and is very hardwearing and easy to clean but it flattens and 'tracks' very quickly.

Years ago when the DC were young we had a 100% nylon velvet pile carpet which sounds cheap but it looked lovely and was incredibly stain-resistant and shampooed up beautifully and lasted for years.

Hate my heather carpet. Looks like it has white threads on it.

Also if you choose wool are you in the south which has increasing problems with clothes moths?

Clothes moths, really? Not heard about that being a problem in carpets but just today I noticed a hole in my cashmere sweater.

Surely with carpets the regular hovering would prevent any infestation or damage? I am in the south. Worried now.

Hi village

I vacuum once a day. Still had clothes moths as they go in the corners of rooms, under chest of drawers etc.

They are so difficult to get rid of! Weirdly they haven't touched my clothes - just my carpet!

Just moved house. In my old house had 100% wool carpets less than a year ago. New one 100% polypropylene put in 5 years.

Old house had very visible wear and colour change where furniture had been. New house some flattening where table legs etc had been, but generally much better condition.

Previously would have always bought wool, have changed my mind!

Wool moths (actually the caterpillars) are a very real problem. They destroyed one of my carpets as I didn't know I had an infestation. They were behind and under a bookcase and a cabinet that I rarely ever moved. It was only when I started seeing the moths and I began to wonder where so many were coming from. It took me years to get rid as they can survive even without the wool
I would say pick whatever you like and go for the highest pile weight you can afford. Man made fibres are much tougher and are pretty easy to clean. Stains are easy to remove and they keep colour better than wool.
Wool carpets look better for longer (not including stains) but are much higher maintenance

I never thought I'd say this but I think I'm coming round to looking at options other than wool for our new house.

It'll probably just be for the bedrooms because there's parquet elsewhere, and we can still have a nice (wool) rug in the sitting room.

We have had 80/20 wool mix, 100% wool, and polyproylene carpets fitted over the past four years.

Pros of the 80/20 and the 100% wool have been that there has been minimal shading and pile flattening. As you hoover the carpet sheds a little each time to keep the colour looking fresh. (we have a grey 100% wool carpet, and 80/20 carpet in a duck egg colour).

Cons of the wool mix and wool carpets have been that we have found it very difficult/ impossible to get some stains out of them, which is irritating as they are not very old (4 years), but look horrid in areas. We have cats though so quite a lot of the stains have been due to the cats being sick on the carpet while I'm not around, or bringing a creature in and dismembering it on said carpet... The cats also choose to scratch on the wool carpets rather than the polypropylene carpet, (or several scratching posts...) This ruins the twist in the twist pile 80/20 carpet, and just makes it look like a fuzzy patch.

Pros of the polypropylene carpet have been ease of cleaning stains which have come out far better than the same types of stains on the wool carpets. The cats aren't interested in scratching it either, and we picked a polypropylene carpet that looks a little bit like an 80/20 wool carpet which I prefer the look of. It was cheaper than a good quality wool mix carpet.

Cons of polypropylene have been that I can see shading on it, especially in the doorway, and the pile has definitely flattened in a more pronounced way, and more quickly than the 80/20 wool mix carpet that has been down for twice as long. We have a mid brown/grey PP carpet with flecks of lighter grey throughout, and though it is darker than any other carpet we have in the house, it does also look grubby in places where there is more footfall. I haven't hired a carpet cleaner or hired someone to clean it though so I don't know if it would come up well if it were cleaned more thoroughly than hoovering.

From the above, we will be sticking with polypropylene for future renovations I think, just for the ease of spot cleaning stains and the cats not scratching it to death. If we didn't have cats, or young children, I'd choose 80/20 wool mix carpets, purely because the pile does not seem to flatten so much, and there was more choice of wool carpet colours than polypropylene when I was looking.

If it was not stained or scratched, I think our 80/20 carpet would still look nearly new though. Our polypropylene carpet certainly does not look nearly new after only 2 years!

We have had a polypropylene carpet and ended up with black marks around the skirting boards. Avoided since then.

We have wool. We have a pale silver grey in our bedroom and no, it is not out of fashion! Some very luxurious hotels have similar! It is a velvet pile and I love it. Two other bedroom carpets are, believe it or not, a "plain" chocolate colour. So is the landing. It is brilliant. No marks, no wear, spruces up well with a vacuum, and complements the decoration in those rooms - borrowed light and cornforth grey from F and B. It is brilliant with white woodwork too. It is shorter cut velvet pile, cheaper than the bedroom one.

I have been down the light coloured carpet route for highly trafficed areas and learned a lesson. Most of my house has wood or ceramic floors, but the carpets still look great and I would not change them.

Black marks are nothing to do with polyprop and because of dust blowing up and through the skirts/floorboards in old houses where the floors havent had ply laid over them

We always had wool or wool mix until we did a loft extension in our old house - I am now a total polyprop convert due to ease of cleaning and we are about to have this newly renovated house fully done in them. We had no problem with flattening but chose a slightly less dense one for the stairs and had and will have wood in the hall.

Just back from a browse around various carpet shops and am shocked at how expensive they've become. We last bought new carpets just over 2 years ago and I swear they were a lot cheaper then.

Polypropylene is no longer a cheap option, and to my surprise other manmade like Polyamide (softer than polypropylene) were more expensive than wool or wool mix.

We're not ready to buy yet (haven't even got a move-in date) but we might have to rethink our budget for carpets.

I’m not sure which shops you have visited but if it’s not urgent you can wait for a sale. Or you cannget your carpets onlibe, request samples and get someone to fit your chosen one.

Sorry for the typos