Baby’s First Area Rug

The rug pad shown in this post was provided to me by RugPadUSA.com in exchange for a test run in our home and a good ol’ American review. The rug itself, something we bought ourselves.

We ripped out around 1,500 sq. ft. of tan carpeting last fall, and I spent a lot of months recovering from the process of installing hardwood floors in their place. And then we had a baby who decided she’s ready to start crawling, and short of having a FLOR runner in our hallway and a bear-shaped rug covering a small part of the floor in her room, we had still been living on our bare wood floors – lux in its own right, but not cozy.

Layering towels and blankets on the floor of the living room was never intended to be a long term solution for our wiggly kid, so we began the hunt for a carpet that we could use to further cozy-up our home. Turns out, Pete and I have very different tastes when it comes to buying area rugs, which did not make this process easy, and in fact, it took several months. You know when you completely fall in love with something only to have your significant other tell you they don’t like it at all? A lot of that, and it went both ways.

By the end, Julia was probably the only one of us who enjoyed the rug shopping process, and it was because she could completely bury herself in those tall, hanging racks and “be in charge” of flipping the carpet pages to reveal the next product. It was on our 3rd or 4th trip to Homegoods that we found our carpet. (I don’t find a lot of decor there–it was more fitting for our last house than the current one–but the rug selection is usually decent [and also, occasionally they have super cool modern chairs]).

At $299 and 7’10” x 10’1″, it was a great price and size and (for Pete) more plush than a woven rug, and right, it’s super beige, you don’t have to remind me about how much beige I just evicted… but have a closer look and notice that there are lots of variegations in the shaggy material, some threading and weaving that’s visually more reminiscent of something handwoven, or more Moroccan or Indian. A little more intriguing than a solid booorrring shag that we might have gotten, and still not at a quality or price point that is going to make me angry if a fruit smoothie tips on it… we’re not the type of people to enforce “no food in the living room” types of laws. Simply put, people like us shouldn’t be allowed to have nice rugs, so this works.

Sometimes when you bring home a new rug, you just have to pet it (and play Yahtzee… Yahtzee peek).

This is where the rug pad comes in. The only other “rug pad” I’ve ever used was “low-profile” like this product, so as semi-cushy as that seemed, this 1/4″ thick pad is a completely different experience, and makes our new rug feel a bit more lush and cush.

The Premium Lock Rug Pad has a natural rubber base and is eco-friendly and safe for hardwood floors like ours (I’ve learned that some PVC rug pads can discolor polyurethane over the years, so it’s nice to not have to give a second thought to this one). And as it is marketed as being eco-friendly, I can attest to there being no weird plasticy smells, and it being durable to the touch on both sides of the pad.

Pre-pad, our rug was heavy enough to not slide around and wasn’t lumpy in any way, but a rug pad is great for securing and evening out rugs that aren’t. It adds a nice, firm cushion underfoot, and though realistically it’ll be years/decades before I can attest to whether it’ll hold up or disintegrate (I think this happened to a rug pad in my youth?), right now, first impressions, it feels nice. Even before this company wrote to me, I had been shopping around for a rug pad that would fit the slightly “off” size of our 7’10” x 10’1″ area rug, because I figured if we were pushing around our couch at all and grinding the rough rug underside against the floorboards, we could end up with scratches. It was nice to learn that Rug Pad USA will cut the order to size, which helps for some of the weird, non-standard rug sizes that you find when you (ah-hem) bargain shop for rugs at places like Overstock, Amazon, IKEA, and… HomeGoods. Our pad sits about 1″ inside each edge, so it’s completely hidden.

The living room itself is coming along nicely with the help of that coffee table and our new rug, except that a little vignette like this is pretty good at hiding the big bounce-a-roo and unnecessarily large stack of baby toys on the other side of the couch, so don’t be fooled. And fans of the Tillary sectional who are spying those wrinkles in the cushions, I still owe you a new review of how we like this couch (I get a lot of emails and questions, so lemme work to get something up here soon).