The New Carpet Smell....AHHH!

The most used room in our house is the Family Room. It has the TV, video games, and is right off the kitchen, so it tends to be the gathering place. It's also the most abused room in the house. No matter how much I yell at my kids to keep the food and drinks OUT of the room, there still seems to be a large number of stains that have mysteriously appeared over the years. I was vacuuming the room one day and thinking "why do I bother?" and thinking about December, when Hali gets baptized, and having a house full of people and being embarrassed by the state of my carpet. I really think that poor carpet was past the point of being saved by a good cleaning. Take a look for yourself:

It's even worse when you take the furniture out!
I love it when you can see right were the furniture was! So, I finally told Scott that we needed to get new carpet in the family room. Luckily, the room is surrounded by hardwood, so it was easy enough to just replace the carpet in that room alone. Here is the results!
We went darker and more plush. I hated the shaggy that we had before and wanted to go totally different. We upgraded the padding, too, so it's so soft. I just love to walk around on it with my bare feet.

I had to take a picture of Scott. It took forever for him to put the entertainment center back together! Course, he was dealing with the TV, X-box, Wii, DVD player, cable box and receiver, so I'm not surprised that it took a while. That's a lot of wires!
Here's the room put all back together again. I love it! It feels like a whole new room. When there was no furniture back in the room I kept feeling like we were moving into a new house. It was because of the new carpet smell.

LOVE IT! Now I just have to save up enough money to do the whole house!