Area Rug Shopping Guide: Part 1

Area rugs are an excellent way to elevate any room in your home. They are a versatile flooring solution that offers maximum beauty without breaking the bank. Area rugs are mobile, easy to maintain, and a much more affordable option than installing brand-new flooring. In a previous Flooring 101 blog, we detailed the 7 Reasons Area Rugs Rule while going in-depth on the many excellent benefits that area rugs offer.

This time, we’re shifting our focus from the benefits of area rugs to choosing the right area rug for you and your home. To help make the rug shopping experience easier and more streamlined for our customers, we’ve created a step-by-step area rug shopping guide. We hope that following this guide and asking these questions throughout your buyer’s journey will enable you to find the perfect area rug for your space. 

Here is our step-by-step area rug shopping guide:

Consider your Area Rug wants & needs

At the onset of your area rug shopping experience, it’s essential to ask yourself the following questions to help narrow down your search:

• What is my area rug budget?
• What room will the rug go in?
• Is this area rug meant for style, functionality, or a little of both?
• What level of maintenance am I looking for in an area rug?
• Will children or pets come into contact with this rug, and if so, how will that impact the wear and tear?

By asking and answering these questions early on in your area rug shopping process, it will make for a more simplified shopping process later on. 

Decide on the size, shape, and placement of your Area Rug

Having nailed down the room where you want the rug and other essential information like budget, level of functionality, maintenance, and so on, it’s time to move on to the next step. 

Size, shape, and rug placement are essential considerations early on in the rug process, as you must know where the rug will go and how big you want the rug to be before considering the cosmetic side of things. It may help to measure the room in question when considering your potential rug’s overall size and shape.

Searching for the right rug for a room can be challenging as you don’t want something too big that covers up all of the flooring within a room, but you also don’t want something that’s too small and is engulfed by your furniture or existing design elements. 

To measure your room for an area rug, you should take measurements of the room and then reduce them by 1-2 feet to determine a reasonable rug size for that specific space.

The placement of your rug depends on the room in question. Area rugs should contain all the significant furniture in a room while remaining somewhat centered. Area rugs can also help ease transitions from one room to the next. 

Part 2 of our Area Rug rug shopping guide is coming soon!

Be on the lookout for part two of our area rug shopping guide very soon. Our second installment will cover finding the right rug material, the benefits of various styles/pile types, and matching your rug to your current design aesthetics. 

Until then, browse our incredible selection of area rugs at Flooring 101, or contact us for any area rug-related questions!