Knitting carpet

For more than 10 years, ever since we moved into this house, I've winced every time I passed through the family room. That's a lot of wincing since we spend 80% of our time together there. The cause of my unhappiness? Dark green carpet. While the rest of the house is carpeted and tiled in blissful beige, the family room was clad in darkness. That green carpet sucked all the light out of the windows. We didn't replace it initially because we planned to install hardwoods. Then came Crohn's Disease and a stuttering economy, and ten years passed.

The ugly carpet is finally gone.

One of my freelance clients, a family friend, decided to compensate me with a Visa gift card. I really did the work pro bono, but they insisted. So we decided to use the windfall on the family room carpet.  Hello, Empire! (Who else would do a single room without charging a huge surcharge? Believe me - I shopped around. Empire was quite reasonable and the installation crew amazingly adept and helpful.)

The kids noticed the light first. Then T was struck by how much roomier the space looks. I'm thrilled by the consistent palette throughout the first floor. Hurray!

It's a shallow thing, in this time of economic turmoil, to spend money on carpet for a single room. But the benefits to our family - light, most of all - are satisfying to the soul.