Carpet Bomb
Today I am relocated to the kitchen, with my comfy chair and my computer, and access to the kettle and supply of teabags, while all around me chaos reigns. Because today we are having a new carpet fitted!
Yes, barely two years after the workmen casually took a Stanley knife to the old carpet during the construction of the new kitchen, to check the position of the old boiler pump ("...yep, that's the old boiler pump"), because The Husband said they could, because we were going to get the carpet replaced anyway (but we ran out of money after the Big Kitchen Adventure), and barely eight months after a friend's over-excitable Labrador crapped on it at Hogmanay, and we laughed it off ("hah hah!") because by this time we had the money and it was going to be replaced very soon, in fact, we were just waiting for the the plumber-and gas-fitter man to come and fit the new gas fire, and re-tile the fireplace, and fit a new...thing... in the chimney, all of which mysteriously took eight months, and the actual fire isn't fitted yet but by this time we'd bought the bloody carpet and we'd HAD ENOUGH!, so we told 'em to come and fit it anyway, so here they are today ripping up acres of worn and soiled mid-Status-Quo-denim-blue carpet and replacing it with acres of...
A brief history of carpets: Back in the Old Days (ie, the Seventies), carpets came in colours such as oxtail-soup brown, bilious green, dirty maroon, and - more commonly - a combination of all three plus a few more, and they always, always had a pattern on them, usually some loopy, swirly, splodgy affair which gave you motion sickness just sitting there looking at it, but it had a pattern on it so it wouldn't show the dirt! Or, indeed, the various bits of kibble and detritus which inevitable end on the floor, because back in the Seventies, although people had vacuum cleaners it was forbidden to use them more than once a week because you'd wear them out or something, I don't know - why are you asking me? It was the Seventies. People were weird, okay?
But anyway, that was the received wisdom of carpets. Then towards the end of the Eighties, it all changed. A carpet revolution swept the land (and the floors). Patterns were out, and acres of calm, blank colour - occasionally speckled with the odd dot here and there to reassure those not quite ready to give up the psychedelia just yet - were in.
When we moved house* in 1993 we were greeted in our new abode by a swathe of unadorned mid-denim-blue which stretched from the living room, out into the hall, up the stairs and across the top landing. Radical! As the carpet came with the house, I didn't have any choice in the colour, but that was okay, the mid-denim-blue was unobtrusive and soothing, and I'd probably only have chosen something like screaming red if I'd had my way, so it was probably just as well.
Some eighteen years later, and come the time to put a merciful bullet through the now elderly and beer-stained blue acres, it became apparent that for the first time in my life**, I would actually have to choose a carpet myself OMG! Decisions!
To the carpet shop, then, to peruse their samples. And samples they had a-plenty. But apparently yet another revolution had taken place in the carpet world, this one fuelled, I suspect, by those home-makeover programs so popular some year back. Nowadays, it seems, you can get any colour of carpet you want, as long as it is... beige.
The shop was full of swatches, all in minuscule gradations of pale brown, from off-white through to anaemic-pooh. Of course, this presents a bit of a problem for the carpet manufacturers. How to differentiate one beige from another? A bit of creativity is required, as much for the workers in the carpet industry as for the customers, for it must be a soul-destroying experience to go to work every day and make carpet in a very slightly different shade of pale-brown from the one you made the day before. So instead of asking the customer to choose between "Beige", "Slightly darker beige" "Slightly lighter beige" and "Slightly lighter than this beige, but not as dark as that beige" we are presented with a bewilderingly eclectic selection: Honey, Oatmeal, Sand, Natural, Clay, Flax, Beachcomber, Sesame, Twine, Slurry, Toenail, Goat, Eczema, Ebola... You would not believe the number of euphemisms there are for beige!
In the end, after squinting for about an hour at three samples, trying to convince myself that there actually was a difference between then, I chose... Taupe!
And I believe the men have finished, so let us take a peek at their handiwork. Welcome to the Age of Beige!
I would just like to point out that the wallpaper came with the house too.
Yes, alright I chose the green paint.
Big Cat approves of this new development
* In fact, we bought the house for the carpet. Rural Aberdeenshire, being a conservative place at the best of times had largely failed to embrace the revolution at this point, and we had just spent about six months visiting houses be-floored in the traditional Seventies fashion (some instances, by the look of it, being the genuine vintage)
** Inheriting acres of fitted mid-denim-blue was a step up the ladder from my previous carpeting experiences which involved taking whatever second-hand floor-covering someone was giving away, regardless of colour or dimensions. The house we were moving from contained one of these items - The Husband had been offered it from someone at work, and he described it to me as "red", so I agreed to give it a new home. This turned out to be "red" for values of "red" which included bright turquoise blue with gold and brown and green in a sort of swirly, arabesque pattern. If you consider that the room into which this carpet was laid had walls of two different shades of pink described on the paint chart as "Jezebel" (bright fuchsia) and "Flamingo" (Barbie-on-steroids), then it is a wonder that we had any retinas left.
Yes, barely two years after the workmen casually took a Stanley knife to the old carpet during the construction of the new kitchen, to check the position of the old boiler pump ("...yep, that's the old boiler pump"), because The Husband said they could, because we were going to get the carpet replaced anyway (but we ran out of money after the Big Kitchen Adventure), and barely eight months after a friend's over-excitable Labrador crapped on it at Hogmanay, and we laughed it off ("hah hah!") because by this time we had the money and it was going to be replaced very soon, in fact, we were just waiting for the the plumber-and gas-fitter man to come and fit the new gas fire, and re-tile the fireplace, and fit a new...thing... in the chimney, all of which mysteriously took eight months, and the actual fire isn't fitted yet but by this time we'd bought the bloody carpet and we'd HAD ENOUGH!, so we told 'em to come and fit it anyway, so here they are today ripping up acres of worn and soiled mid-Status-Quo-denim-blue carpet and replacing it with acres of...
A brief history of carpets: Back in the Old Days (ie, the Seventies), carpets came in colours such as oxtail-soup brown, bilious green, dirty maroon, and - more commonly - a combination of all three plus a few more, and they always, always had a pattern on them, usually some loopy, swirly, splodgy affair which gave you motion sickness just sitting there looking at it, but it had a pattern on it so it wouldn't show the dirt! Or, indeed, the various bits of kibble and detritus which inevitable end on the floor, because back in the Seventies, although people had vacuum cleaners it was forbidden to use them more than once a week because you'd wear them out or something, I don't know - why are you asking me? It was the Seventies. People were weird, okay?
But anyway, that was the received wisdom of carpets. Then towards the end of the Eighties, it all changed. A carpet revolution swept the land (and the floors). Patterns were out, and acres of calm, blank colour - occasionally speckled with the odd dot here and there to reassure those not quite ready to give up the psychedelia just yet - were in.
When we moved house* in 1993 we were greeted in our new abode by a swathe of unadorned mid-denim-blue which stretched from the living room, out into the hall, up the stairs and across the top landing. Radical! As the carpet came with the house, I didn't have any choice in the colour, but that was okay, the mid-denim-blue was unobtrusive and soothing, and I'd probably only have chosen something like screaming red if I'd had my way, so it was probably just as well.
Some eighteen years later, and come the time to put a merciful bullet through the now elderly and beer-stained blue acres, it became apparent that for the first time in my life**, I would actually have to choose a carpet myself OMG! Decisions!
To the carpet shop, then, to peruse their samples. And samples they had a-plenty. But apparently yet another revolution had taken place in the carpet world, this one fuelled, I suspect, by those home-makeover programs so popular some year back. Nowadays, it seems, you can get any colour of carpet you want, as long as it is... beige.
The shop was full of swatches, all in minuscule gradations of pale brown, from off-white through to anaemic-pooh. Of course, this presents a bit of a problem for the carpet manufacturers. How to differentiate one beige from another? A bit of creativity is required, as much for the workers in the carpet industry as for the customers, for it must be a soul-destroying experience to go to work every day and make carpet in a very slightly different shade of pale-brown from the one you made the day before. So instead of asking the customer to choose between "Beige", "Slightly darker beige" "Slightly lighter beige" and "Slightly lighter than this beige, but not as dark as that beige" we are presented with a bewilderingly eclectic selection: Honey, Oatmeal, Sand, Natural, Clay, Flax, Beachcomber, Sesame, Twine, Slurry, Toenail, Goat, Eczema, Ebola... You would not believe the number of euphemisms there are for beige!
In the end, after squinting for about an hour at three samples, trying to convince myself that there actually was a difference between then, I chose... Taupe!
And I believe the men have finished, so let us take a peek at their handiwork. Welcome to the Age of Beige!
I would just like to point out that the wallpaper came with the house too.
Yes, alright I chose the green paint.
Big Cat approves of this new development
* In fact, we bought the house for the carpet. Rural Aberdeenshire, being a conservative place at the best of times had largely failed to embrace the revolution at this point, and we had just spent about six months visiting houses be-floored in the traditional Seventies fashion (some instances, by the look of it, being the genuine vintage)
** Inheriting acres of fitted mid-denim-blue was a step up the ladder from my previous carpeting experiences which involved taking whatever second-hand floor-covering someone was giving away, regardless of colour or dimensions. The house we were moving from contained one of these items - The Husband had been offered it from someone at work, and he described it to me as "red", so I agreed to give it a new home. This turned out to be "red" for values of "red" which included bright turquoise blue with gold and brown and green in a sort of swirly, arabesque pattern. If you consider that the room into which this carpet was laid had walls of two different shades of pink described on the paint chart as "Jezebel" (bright fuchsia) and "Flamingo" (Barbie-on-steroids), then it is a wonder that we had any retinas left.