Hopefully by now you know that Adam and I are renovating a Cape Cod style house (which I always lovingly refer to as Maple Hollow Cottage) in Oklahoma City. We bought the house a couple months ago, but have still been living in our old home in order to keep it staged for showings and because there are just some renovations you do not want to be in a house during.

Well, if you follow me on Instagram you know that our current house SOLD last week. Conveniently, renovations over at Maple Hollow Cottage have been underway in the meantime and I’m finally ready to start sharing them with you!

Our first order of business was to rip up all of the carpet on the second story and install hardwood to match the downstairs wood that was already there. This also included ripping up the carpet in the downstairs master suite (there’s a downstairs and upstairs master) and replacing it with hardwood as well. This was time intensive as we had to color match the wood, special order it, wait for the order to come in, wait for one of the workers to get back from vacation and various other delays. So it worked out that we still wanted to live in our old house until we sold it. As soon as all of our new flooring was done, it was time to move on to project #2: the staircase.

The staircase is located right after the entry way ends on the right hand side, right before you step down into the living room. It’s pretty central and visible to anyone entering our house. Because of this, we wanted it to make a statement. The former owners had carpet on the stairs already, but needless to say, it was not my favorite look. Here is a picture of it as they had it – this picture was taken from the Zillow posting of our house before we bought it.

Not pictured is the bottom two steps where there is visible wood that matches the banister. I knew immediately that this carpet had to go and that instead of completely covering the wood, I wanted a staircase runner to go down the middle of the staircase, exposing wood on both sides.

The question then became: what carpet to use?

After some in-depth internet searching, I landed on Stark, a Dallas-based company. I loved a specific print they had called Midland in the color Ink. To see an example of this, go here: https://www.starkcarpet.com/midland

The more important part of this story is that I originally found Stark because they carry the BEAUTIFUL antelope print I’d been dying to have. But Adam was not sold on it. So we had settled on the Midland carpet and we had a sample mailed to us. But, delays on our hardwood floors kept pushing back the staircase carpeting project and we kept pushing off ordering it and scheduling install. This meant that our communication with the rep at Stark became frustrating because we couldn’t give him the answers he needed from us since we didn’t know when our floors would be done. Oh the joys of renovation waiting games.

Adam started to get into his mind that he wanted to check out a local rug store that had been recommended to him by someone at work –http://www.rugandcarpetofoklahoma.com/

Because I’m a good wife, I humored him and went with him one day although I was still set on my Midland carpet. But um…FATE! We walked into their warehouse and one of their employees had a huge antelope rug laid out and was measuring it to cut for a client. Seeing the print in real life was a game-changer for Adam. He doesn’t visualize things as easily as I do and so sometimes physically seeing it in person does the trick. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this sooner. Here is how it looked laid out that day in the warehouse:

Needless to say, Adam loved it. But because we wanted to do our due diligence, we looked at all of the other options. They even had one that looked almost exactly like the Midland carpet from Stark. So we pulled a swatch of that one, a swatch of the Deerfield (what I keep referring to as antelope) and a swatch of a cream gingham pattern and we took them out to the house to see which one we liked best. I highly suggest doing this for any carpet options whether it’s floor carpeting, stair carpeting or getting custom rugs cut. Always get a swatch and take it out to see how it looks in your space. You want to compare it to the lighting that space has, the color of the walls, the furniture that’s visible around it, etc.

Y’all I had fallen in deep love with the antelope carpet trend well before we saw it laid out that day and so even though we took swatches to the house and I was wiling to go with another carpet choice if Adam liked one better, I was REALLY hoping when I asked him which was his favorite that he’d say Deerfield. And I’m not sure if it was because he actually liked it best or because he knew I wanted it so badly, but he said Deerfield (insert heart eyes emoji). The Deerfield print comes in four or five different color options, but we chose Sand.

Here is the picture I took the day we made the decision. The old carpet had been ripped up and the wood underneath was not in as good of shape as we had hoped.

Check out that first step at the bottom of the picture where they had just painted white around the existing carpet. Lord have mercy. Because of the situation going on with the wood on the stairs, we kinda pulled an audible and decided to put in treads and risers, paint the wood white and paint the banister white as well. I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out but after the new wood was installed and it was painted, Adam went out to the house and sent me this picture and my heart did a little somersault because I kinda loved it a whole lot:

It was finally time to lay the carpet. I was sitting in my U.S. Foreign Policy class yesterday afternoon when my phone lit up with the text from Adam that the install was done. I couldn’t help myself, I had to peek. And it basically took everything in me not to squeal in the middle of class because LOOK!

AAAHHHH!

Man. I just love it so much. And no these are not great photos of a perfectly staged shot because um, the house is empty and there’s probably scraps of wood and painting tarps on the floor in the living room and I don’t necessarily want to try to perfectly curate photos of the reno – I want to show it to you raw as we go project by project.

That being said, we are on to project #3 – paint! Not very exciting, but if you want a blog post on it I’m happy to oblige, just drop a comment below!

XOXO, Thessali

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