This giveaway is over. At the end of this post are more posts on our whole house renovation.

We have finally moved upstairs to the main level of our home we’ve been renovating since September… 9 months ago!

This is super exciting for us. At times it honestly felt like it was never going to happen! But it finally did and we are thrilled. So thrilled that I want you to be thrilled too! I didn’t think just us moving up to the main level of our house was going to thrill too many other people, so I have a thrilling giveaway for you to get thrilled over too!! (how many times can I use the word thrill in a single paragraph?!)

So here is the celebration giveaway…

RugPadUSA has graciously joined efforts with me to give away a rug pad to one of my followers!

Yup! Totally free to one lucky, randomly chosen person! (look towards the bottom of this post how to sign up to enter the giveaway)

But…

There’s more good news…

even if you’re not the 1 lucky reader selected to receive a free rug pad, RugPadUSA is offering an extra discount to ALL my readers until July 2, 2018. Their rug pads are on sale already, but if you enter in ‘simpledecoratingtips’ when you check out, you will receive an additional discount off your purchase!

So let’s talk a little about rug pads…

Having a rug pad under a rug will help prolong the life of the rug. The pad helps reduce friction of the bottom of the rug (the wefts and warps… those ‘cords that are the construction of the rug) preventing extra wear on them.

A rug pad can offer grip-ability between the rug and floor, so the rug isn’t sliding around.

Having a pad under your rug also gives comfort and cushion, depending on which thickness you select.

Some poorly constructed pads can deteriorate, leaving their dusty residue on the floor. Sometimes poorly constructed pads can even discolor the floor or leave it with a residue. Those are the pads to stay away from.  Check out RugPadUSA, they take extra care with the ingredients and manufacturing of their product so that they don’t do that.

I was fortunate enough to receive a free rug pad from RugPadUSA. They sent me the pad and size I chose.

RugPadUSA has many options for how thick the pads are, how much they grip the floor, the size… pretty much any consideration for a rug pad you would have, they have an option for.

I chose this pad:

It’s the Eco Plush 1/4″ 9×13 pad.

I selected it for the low nap rug in the living room. I didn’t need a lot of grip on it, nor did I want a thick cushy pad for under this flatweave rug, so the 1/4″ was perfect.

We rolled it out in the living room.

Would have been great to do this before any furniture was moved in, but the floor finisher said no rugs for 2 weeks, and we just weren’t willing to wait that long to move upstairs! So we worked around the furniture.

Fortunately, I had my husband helping me place the rug, so one person lifts the furniture corner as the other one slides the pad and rug under.

I wanted to have the center of the rug centered on the center of the antique cabinet in the room. The axis, if you will. That antique cabinet, which the TV sits on is centered on the room, so the center line of the rug patteren needed to line up with it.

The rug pad was a little longer than the rug.

I trimmed the rug pad with heavy duty kitchen shears. (that was kind of hard… not sure if they recommend a different way to cut it, but my hand felt like it was going to fall off!)

After we got it all in place and the furniture moved back, I realized I failed to follow my rule of unrolling the rug so that the curled inside edge is not facing the entrance to the room. That tightly curled edge usually takes a while to relax.

I thought it was going to be ok, but after a day of tripping on it, I used green painter’s tape and taped it down for a few days. I was a little nervous about doing that on the freshly finished pine floors though… I sure didn’t want that tape to pull off the finish.

After about a week, I took the tape off and thought it was going to be ok…

Darn!

The rug curled back up just enough to trip over again. My husband is having knee surgery soon, and if he trips over it then, that would be disastrous!

So, as if it wasn’t hard enough working around the previously moved furniture in the room, I then took on the task to flip the rug around without my husband’s help. Yikes, that is nearly an impossible feat, but I did it somehow and the rug is laying beautifully flat:

I love the new rug, (I ordered it last summer from Ballard Designs on clearance). It had been so long since I had ordered it until I finally opened the rug to see it, I had nearly forgotten what it looked like. (we had all our stuff in storage for the 9 months our house was being renovated)

Our house isn’t quite ready for the big ‘reveal’ but you got a glimpse of the living room space. We still have a lot of unpacking to do and artwork to get up on the walls… but I’ll post many more projects we did to this main level coming up.

Here is more about with our whole house renovation project:

Thanks so much for stopping by! Please feel free to follow and share this blog with your friends, as well as on Facebook, Pinterest, Flipboard, Bloglovin, YouTube and now Instagram!  I appreciate you reading along.