ling yeung b

The previous owners of the house are very keen on fitness and biking. Good for them, but not so good for the poor second bedroom on the first floor! They turned it into a gym with a treadmill and weights, as well as a bike garage. Doesn’t sound too bad? Well, not until you see the oil stains all over the carpet!

I suppose we could have just changed the horrible beige carpet, but in the long term, we want to have the same wooden floors we’ve installed in the master bedroom everywhere else on the first and second floors, so it seems such a waste to spend money on carpets now.

Short term solution? A rug. If you can’t fix it, hide it, right?

Since we decided not to fix the cracks or paint the walls (again, it’s going to be throwaway money when we do phase 2), the room is pretty dull, which is why I wanted someting quite bold, but not necessarily colourful, to give the room some character. And since I’m having a few geometric things in the living room, I decided to extend that theme into the second bedroom.

And so my search for black and white geometric rugs began… I was shocked when I saw some of the prices! I mean, can you go on a magic carpet ride on them? Like this <a href=”http://www.okadirect.com/masai-dhurrie-cotton-rug-large.aspx?vid=tfu003bld-02 target=”_blank”>Masai Dhurrie cotton rug from OKA</a>. It’s pretty, and it’s huge, but who has £965 for something to step on?! Not me!

Image credit: OKA

And this is when Ikea (once again) comes to the rescue! I keep on raving about Ikea as if they pay me commission or something (wouldn’t that be nice though?)! But honestly, this LAPPLJUNG RUTA is £75, as in, for the price of one OKA rug, you can get almost 13 of these! It has a low pile, flat-woven surface, which is perfect because… (1) it’s low maintenance, (2) the room will double up as our study / office, we’ll want to be able to roll around in our chairs easily, and (3) the room might triple up as Jimbo’s gaming den, which means the boys will be consuming a lot of snacks in there, so I don’t want crumbs to be going into the rug!

Image credit: Ikea

Unfortunately the room is still full of boxes at the moment, but once everything’s been unpacked, I’ll show you how the rug looks!