Carpets and more window shopping

Today was a window shopping day.  We had breakfast with our friends who are also building but building in Alexandria.  Theirs is a house that is bespoke as it needs to be as it's only 5 metres wide!  I actually approached the builders before them and ended up recommending them to chat.  The house is looking amazeballs!

Peering in the back fence

Amazing front facade

We also went to Canalside Furniture to have a sticky beak.  Wow, lots of lovely furniture and settings there.  Something we can definitely consider when we come closer to getting ready to buy new furniture.  The bookshelves look great but more and more I'm leaning towards a bespoke version done by Jason.  More about this in a later blog post.

A custom designed bookshelf from Canalside for our place would be somewhere around the $17k mark.  Hmm.... I think not!  For insight into my 'cheap' thoughts on how to get the look for less check out my IKEA hack musings.

Here are a couple of photos of the stuff we looked at:

Amazing what some black paint does too for this setting :)

A bit 70s looking but still nice

Another table option

We also went to Faded Empire which our friend Sheilzy has recommended to me previously and they have a lovely table (The village door one!)

At the moment no idea how much it costs but imagine it'll be over the $3000 mark.  I'm thinking now to get the Pottery Barn Benchwright table even though I probably should either DIY or get one from Amart or similar... 

Here's a pic of my current thinking esp since it's on special!!  (hurry up house!)

I prefer the second one's colour but in Australia I think it's only available in the darker colours as there is no option for the lighter coloured version.

The task for today though was looking for carpet.  We stopped in Carpet Court in Kogarah first and then Hardly Normal (Harvey Norman) in Caringbah.

The Carpet Court also have the Quick step finishing edging stuff (Incizo) so we'll be going back there so we don't have to use scotia.  Here is how it works:

We went around a few times with a helpful guy, Kurtis, who lives in our area... and shortlisted to these two carpets:

We forgot to bring our floorboard along so we just put something sort of similar in between to see how it would work.  The bright yellow is the underlay we would want (the best stuff :) )

Here they are side by side.

Mid way through we had quite a few options we had to cull out

From a distance the colours do become less dark

We think we can carpet the two bedrooms and the home theatre with these for around $3500.

We then headed off to Harvey Norman.  The options we ended up were within the Smartstrand range which is meant to be super stain resistant.

The carpet for the bedroom (the one on the right in the pic above) is super soft and lovely.  But I just don't think I can justify the cost difference!  So the carpets from Harvey Norman would end up at least $5000.  I think the $1500 can definitely be used better elsewhere as we were super happy with the Carpet Court options too!

So the carpets we are getting are these:

This is looking super brown in this light!

So we haven't paid a deposit as they are in stock and it seems like we only need to provide 48 hour notice although it will also need a remeasure.