Hi, I'm Jeremiah, I'm with Showcase Floors. And today, we're going to be talking about carpet. A lot of customers have been asking us, "Why are there so many different kinds of carpet? What do the different kinds do? Why would you use different kinds of carpet in different areas?" So today, I'm going to briefly touch on some of those questions. Carpet really has three different fibers that carpet is made of. You start with polyester. A lot of times, it's recycled pop bottles. Has a nice story there, but it is a plastic base carpet. And then it goes into nylon. This structurally is a little bit stronger.

However, you have to treat it a little bit more. There are stain treatments, that's why you have Stainmaster and some of these treatments to make sure that doesn't stain. And then at the high end, you have wool, which is what all the other fibers are just trying to be more and more like is wool. Wool is a natural fiber, it's got a great green story. It's my favorite, but it's also the most expensive. So for a lot of people, I say, if you're going to use wool, I would use it in a master bedroom.

Wool has some really great natural qualities, as far as it always wants to balance the humidity level in your room. So in the middle of winter, when all your clothes are sticking to you because you got static cling, the wool is going to add moisture back into that room. In the middle of summer, when it's humid out, it's going to draw that moisture out of the room. It always wants to balance out the humidity level of the room it's in, which is an amazing feature that a carpet is doing. It also happens to be maybe the most durable thing I've ever seen in the carpet world.

If I go into a house and somebody says, "We've had this carpet for 30 years," it's almost inevitably a wool carpet and somebody decided to pay upfront to have that lasting quality. With nylon and polyester, they both are just fine as well, but you want to make sure you know who made it and the quality of the construction, which is why at Showcase Floors, we only carry the brands that we trust in the carpet world. The reason you'd want to use carpet over maybe other types of flooring is carpet per square foot is still the cheapest, the warmest, the most comfortable type of flooring to put in a house. More and more, we're seeing people going away from carpet. However, we still see a lot of carpet in the bedrooms and we see a lot of rugs. We see a lot of carpet on steps.

I still think it's the best solution in a residential house is to carpet your steps just for safety, if nothing else, but it's also the most inexpensive way to get those steps covered. So one way to think about carpet too, is not all carpet needs to go throughout the house is the same level of carpet. When somebody walks in your house, what I call your prime time area, when you come in your front door, that might be the place you spend a little more and get yourself a real design centered piece of carpet. Something that pops when they come in your house. If I'm putting a house together for somebody building a house, a lot of times in the bedroom is where I put the lower end carpets, especially in the kids' bedrooms. We're going to let them destroy those carpets for a few years before we get them a nice piece of carpet.

If I'm going to have a high traffic area, such as steps or stairs, I'm going to pay more attention to the dense and more tightly packed carpets that are going to hold up better over time. So this is the reason to talk to an expert before you start selecting where you're going to put your carpet and what kind of carpet you're going to use. One of the issues that a lot of people have with carpet is, "My pets are destroying my carpet." And there is better carpets out there. We actually have pet-friendly carpet that have some natural deodorizers in the carpet.

Another thing with pets and carpet is the durability of the carpet. So you want to make sure again, that you get a carpet that understands that you have pets that are going to be living on your carpet. We are here to help make sure that you get the right floor in the right space. So stop on by to Showcase Floors. The address at Showcase Floors is 3499 39th Street South in Fargo. And our hours are 8:00 to 6:00 during the week. We are happy to schedule an appointment at night or on the weekend. That way, you get our exclusive time.

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