When I bought my first home — the one I would live in for 14 years — it was small, just under 1,000 square feet, and there were hardwood floors throughout. At one point, I decided to carpet two of the rooms. They weren’t that big, so it didn’t cost that much. No big deal.
Cut to my current home, in which every room needed new carpet. I was thinking, “No problem — shouldn’t be too bad.” I was adamant about putting in carpet throughout the house. I called several places and ended up going with the popular place we had seen a million commercials and billboards for over the years.
Looking back, it’s funny. I went through the entire house showing the carpet guy how much carpet I wanted, how I wanted thick padding so you sink into the carpet and on and on and on. He was very accommodating, typing my every word into the tablet. I was excited. My husband and I had a new home; we were doing other small renovation projects throughout and fresh carpet would be the finishing touch. The eager carpet guy (who saw dollar signs in the commission he’d receive) looked up at me after calculating and said, “Great, Mrs. Kelly. That will run you about $20,000.”
Whoa, Nelly. Hold on a minute. Twenty-thousand dollars for three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room and one flight of stairs? Talk about serious sticker shock. Our budget was nowhere near that. It was more like $5,000 — which really may have been too low, but we had no clue.
At this point, we knew that we had to look at alternatives and do a little more research. Here is what we found.
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