Indoor Outdoor Carpets

Carpet Buying Guide: How to Buy a Carpet

Buying a new carpet isn’t as easy as it seems. There are quite a few factors that you need to take into consideration while choosing a new carpet. Read on to know how to buy a carpet.

Last week, I ran into an interior designer friend of mine who was busy remodeling his own office. Out of curiosity, I happened to ask him what was the hardest part of the remodeling process. “Choosing the right carpet” is what he said. I was extremely surprised. How could buying such a simple thing as a carpet prove to be so difficult, that too for someone who was professionally into interior designing? That is when he sat me down and explained to me how to buy a carpet and the various carpet buying guidelines that one should follow in the process.

How to Buy a Carpet
In the following sections of this article, we will have a look at some tips on buying carpets, as well as prepare a carpet buying guide which will help you to buy cheap carpets online as well as offline.
Instructions

• First and foremost, measure the size and the dimensions of the room or the area where you wish to install the carpet. Take into account all pieces of furniture while calculating the area to be carpeted.
• Do a bit of homework on the different types of carpets available. This will help you during the actual choosing and carpet buying process. Also, being armed with a bit of knowledge will not only help you in spotting fake carpets, but will also protect you from getting conned by the carpet salesman.
• A mistake that most carpet buyers commit is that they get tempted by those seemingly awesome carpet exchange schemes wherein one can trade in his or her old carpet and be entitled to a 50 to 70 percent discount on a new carpet. The grim reality of such exchange schemes is that 8 in 10 of these schemes are nothing but scams wherein 9 in 10 carpets are fakes. Therefore, you should be wary of the genuineness of such exchange schemes while buying a carpet.
• Know your spending limit. This will keep you from over-spending.
• Understand your carpeting requirements. Carpets that are used in living rooms are often different from those used on stairs, or from those used in your bedroom. Take into consideration various factors like fabric, softness, thickness, warmth, durability, color, carpet stain removal, installation cost, etc. while zeroing in upon your choice of carpet. Hand woven carpets, machine woven carpets and tufted carpets are all different from each other and the difference is noticeable upon close inspection of the carpet fabric and fibers.
• Find out the carpet’s country of make along with other additional manufacturing details if possible. Having some background knowledge about carpet basics can be a big plus point in such situations as it can protect you from making a bad purchase. For example, you should know that authentic Persian carpets are those that are made in Iran and in a few other middle-east Asian countries. So if your carpet salesman says that a particular carpet happens to be a vintage Persian carpet which was hand woven by expert artisans in a tiny village in Bermuda, you better start looking for the nearest exit than continue listening to his tall claims about the authenticity of the Bermudian Persian carpet.
• Inspect the carpet thoroughly. Check how old the carpet is. Modern carpet cleaning and washing techniques such as chemical washing can make a brand new carpet seem as though it were a century-old carpet, so beware of such fakes. Run your hand over the carpet to get an idea of its texture, smoothness, firmness and fiber density.
• Always insist for a certificate of authenticity of the carpet. It is another indication of a genuine Persian carpet and can be useful in fetching you a good amount if you decide to sell the carpet a few years down the line.
• If you are in doubt about how to install the carpet by yourself, have the carpet store install it for you. However, make sure that you are present at the time of installation so that you can guide the workers on where and how you want the carpet to be installed.

In case you were in doubt about how to buy an oriental carpet or for that matter, any other carpet, I hope the above carpet buying guidelines would have made the task easier for you. As a parting advice, always remember this golden rule – if it is so cheap that it’s hard not to take, in all probability it is a fake!

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