The Carpeteria Blog

The Four Seasons of Decorating: Spring

One fun approach to decorating is to think of a room as reflecting one of the four seasons. Design materials, colors and even furniture styles can represent a season. Let’s take a look at what spring is all about.

When you think of spring, look for light bright colors and textures. For flooring, how about a light bamboo or maple floor, with wood shutters painted a bright white. Crown molding and baseboards in white echo the window coverings, and bring a sense of light into the room.

Many colors echo the feeling of spring, but a light green and yellow can really make the space feel like April or May. For fabrics, florals are an easy choice, but think outside the box with a lattice-style pattern or a crisp check in spring tones.

Finish the space with the fresh flowers available only during the spring months – daffodil, tulip and hyacinth plants in pots scattered through the room or – even better – sitting on windowsills, adding the finishing touch. Ready for spring? Your room certainly is!

For the other seasons, click here.

We’re in the middle of summer – past the Fourth of July, before school starts again, the season is about heat, picnics and living outside. How can we bring those feelings into our homes? In this series about decorating our homes to reflect the seasons, let’s stretch out in our hammocks and consider summer.

On flooring – tile is our best choice for handling little wet feet running in after swimming, and cleaning up the drips from popsicles and ice cream cones. Cool on our toes, tile is the flooring of choice for our summer room.

Colors can vary – from the clear blue of a summer sky to the hot golds and oranges of the sun. Whatever your color-choices, choose bright clear tones and combine with sun-kissed sands and khakis. Whatever your upholstery fabric, white canvas slipcovers create a sense of coolness, and can be washed regularly so summer dirt can’t get ahead of you. Combine with a bevy of cotton pillows in all the summer colors, and you have a room that echoes the energy of outside.

Sun shades that can control the amount of light are perfect for summer – letting the sun in for a bright morning, and shading your rooms when the afternoon gets too hot. Add a piece or two of wicker furniture or some baskets to keep that picnic, indoor-outdoor feel alive.

Grab some summer magic for your home, with a room or two wrapped around the season!

WWII was raging and the United States was operating in a wartime economy. Of critical interest to both the government and industry was the dwindling supply of silk used to make parachutes and other military textiles. DuPont’s chemical and textile engineers came to the rescue with a synthetic replacement for silk, which they called nylon. This new fiber quickly found its way into myriad markets, including both commercial and residential carpet manufacturing.

Now, 60 years later, the essential chemical structures of nylon carpet fiber remain virtually unchanged. What have continued to change and improve are ancillary processes like dye methods, carpet construction and finishing technologies. What this means to finished carpet is a constant improvement in on-the-floor performance in places like your house! And the exceptional performance extends to both plush (cut-pile) and loop pile constructions.

Critical to nylon’s success as the world’s most-used carpet fiber is its characteristic colorfastness. Solution-dyed nylon (where color is introduced prior to nylon’s extrusion into fiber) is essentially impervious to the color-damaging effects of exposure to direct sunlight or bleach! Even those nylon fibers dyed after extrusion are intensely colorfast due to the latest technologies for preventing soiling and staining.

Nylon carpets will easily retain their original shape and appearance when they are properly constructed, installed and maintained. They respond well to current commercial cleaning methods, promising years of satisfactory use. The reality is that today’s nylon carpets will never wear out; they simply get ugly at the end of their wear lives.

How about olefin (also called polypropylene)? Certainly nylon has held the primary place in carpet manufacturing, but even so, olefin often gets the call. What is the main reason? Price. Nylon carpets of similar construction generally cost at least 20% more than an olefin. Generally, olefins are offered as berbers in residential construction. This means they come in multi-level, multi-color and usually in earth tones. The name “berber” actually was the name of an ancient North African people, who were known for their woven fabrics, which later came to be known by the name of the weavers themselves.

To date, olefin has had more commercial than residential usage. In fact, about 80% of olefin carpets have been used in commercial markets. However, because of its aggressive pricing, it is finding more prominence in residential usage. Besides being attractively priced, olefins are incredibly colorfast and extremely fade resistant—even when exposed to direct sunlight or chlorine bleach. In addition, olefin carpets are static and mold resistant, making them good choices for basements, rec rooms or screened-in patios.

Remember though, olefin does have its challenges. It is highly susceptible to oil-based staining agents. Consequently, you should never use a solvent-based stain protection treatment. In addition, the fiber has a low melting point, which means that it can actually melt from the friction of furniture being dragged across its face, causing permanent “gouges” in the carpet. Finally, olefin carpets are highly disposed to crushing and matting in high traffic areas.