Please Remove Your Shoes

It didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd hoped but the new carpet project for my condo is complete. I bought the carpet from Costco based on a recommendation from my mom. They sent out a designer from their In-Home Design Service who measured everything and gave me an estimate right before Thanksgiving. I pulled the trigger just before Christmas, the carpet was ordered and an enormous charge was put on my Costco American Express (more about that later).

I opted to tear out the old carpet and padding myself because there were issues I needed to resolve underneath (it also saved me about $300). The builders did a shoddy job when they did my stairs. They left a half inch gap between the drywall and the side of each step. As a result my old carpet had become permanently soiled in that area due to "drafting" from the unfinished area below the stairs. I stressed about how to fix it over Christmas but eventually decided to use Great Stuff expanding foam. I'm glad I did because it worked great even though it can be really messy stuff. All told it took about a week to complete the repairs on the stairs.

The carpet installers arrived on the Monday following New Years. They weren't here 10 minutes and the lead installer told me they didn't have enough carpet to cover the whole space. He told me they'd leave the stairs for last just in case his prediction came to fruition—which, of course, it did. Since the shortfall was the designer's mistake I wasn't liable for any additional costs. Costco called me about an hour after the installers left to apologize and to tell me they'd expedited the order for the remaining carpet. It came about a week later and the installers returned to do the stairs. Unfortunately, I was working from home that day and not able to pay as much attention to what they were doing as I should have. They ended up misaligning the pattern on two steps which I didn't catch until after they left. So I had to call Costco back to complain and about 10 days later the installers were back to redo the two steps. Fortunately there was enough carpet left over or it would have been a real headache.

The carpet is made by Shaw who coincidentally just opened a warehouse less that a mile from me. The pattern is called "Eye-Catching" and the color is called "Ash Blonde". I was a little worried the pattern might be overwhelming and the color too dark, but now that it is installed I think it was a perfect choice. Of course, new carpet means a new No Shoes policy. It also inspired me to buy one of those fancy Dyson vacuum cleaners which I found on-sale at Target for $80 off. It does a great job. Lots of suction and no bags to change.

Now back to the American Express... it is the special Costco Cash Rebate Credit Card that advertises up to 2% cash back on all purchases. After reading the fine print I found that the rebate is actually based on your total annual purchase so you only get 0.25% for the first $2K, 0.5% for the next $3K, and then 1.5% for spending in excess of $5K. The additional 0.5% only factors in when you revolve a balance. So in reality I would only have gotten a 2% rebate on the carpet if I had already charged more than $5K for the year (which I hadn't) and didn't pay off the balance every month (which I always do). What a crock.