Carmen Blake
We’ve known that our giant bedroom was in need of a nice big rug to anchor some of the more showstopping pieces, like big ol’ Ed the Bed and our New Year’s Eve ball-esque pendant light from Ikea. We’re actually planning to place it horizontally under the bed, but we’ll explain more about that in our next post. With our sights set on a size, the discussion then turned to what type of rug we wanted.
So we pretty quickly narrowed things down to two options: a big white shaggy wool rug (kinda like a giant faux sheepskin) or a nice natural jute rug (of the softer braided varieties).
And after a lot of staring at the bedroom and squinting, we decided that both for easy-care and design reasons we were really excited to go for something jute. We just shake them out or vacuum every once in a while, and their coloring and natural fibers just seem to hide dirt and even repel stains, thanks to the straw-like material.
With our loud-ish duvet and a few other not-necessarily-safe choices (like our giant dandelion-ish pendant light, our greeny-yellow curtain panels, and our graphic four-poster-bed) we wanted to allow things like that to be the star, while the rug fell back and worked as a “best supporting actor” of sorts. After a lot of deliberation we decided that we were most enamored with the subtle tone-on-tone diamond pattern of the PB one.
And it didn’t hurt that the price was the lowest one (although with pricier shipping than Overstock, it pretty much made them even when it came to overall cost). But then I realized that we have a Pottery Barn in town (not true for West Elm or Overstock) so I called to see if we could pick it up in the store to save shipping (or get it shipped to the store by the site to save that loot). But when I got to “online checkout” I saw that unlike buying it at the store, it couldn’t be returned if the color was totally different than what we expected. Which admittedly could be mostly remedied by checking one out in the PB store near us before ordering, but sometimes different “batches” have varied coloring.
So we decided that paying $25 more was worth the instant gratification, borrowed John’s sister’s SUV, and drove out to Pottery Barn to make it ours for $249. It still felt like a darn good price for a giant 8 x 10 rug, especially considering the original price was upwards of 300 and it has that cool subtle diamond pattern going on that makes it feel a lot more special than the average jute rug. We also think it all went down the way it was supposed to because we questioned whether the Overstock rug was too orange (you can never tell if it’s their pics or not) or if the West Elm one was too cool looking (it almost looked painted in the pictures) and the PB one is juuust right with our warm wide plank floors now that we’ve got it home.
