it took us nearly 2 years to decide what floor we wanted/could afford in our bedroom.
here's how the debate played out:

me: i hate carpet. carpet sucks. i will never have carpet in our bedroom. never.
him: some carpet can be nice. wool carpet can be nice.
me: nope. no way. i hate it.

we looked at refinishing the old cork floors that were there already: not worth it.
new cork floors: too $$ and not as nice as we had hoped. oh, and they seem to fade quite a bit over time.
fake hardwood: we both agreed this sucks beyond belief. worse than almost anything.
real hardwood: could never come close to being half as gorgeous as our newly refinished old old wood floors
linoleum: eh, not so much in the bedroom

which explains the 1.5 year interlude and why our bedroom was the last room with no baseboards, door or window trim and random paint footprints still left on the wall.

and then we saw nice carpet at a friend's house, it convinced me and we bought some here. simple as that. sort of.

the installation:
1. emptied room and jammed all of our furniture in to the tiny living room
2. cleaned floors, rafters, ceiling (lofted ceiling is really pretty but a major pain to clean). oh, and we did NOT remove the cork flooring. did it once, done with that. no way we were going back there...
3. hammered in strips of floor tacks. wear gloves.
4. put down padding. totally worth it...huge difference. good we listened to our floor expert on this tip. we used our favorite tool to tack it in place. 5. used the carpet stretcher to get the carpet nice and tight. possibly the worst designed tool ever. just plain dumb. the jammer is not so bad...still need some more door molding and window trim. finished pictures to come....

oh, and i love the carpet.

i swear, at some point i really will do a legitimate "before & after" post. but for now, here's some fun bedroom photos to gasp at (note: no, trim is not up yet, molding hasn't even thought about making an appearance, and we couldn't decide what to do with the cork floor so we just painted it white. yes, it scuffs quite easily but for now it works.).

monday

shoveling up the cork tiles. imagine super glue to hold the tiles and then years of people walking over them to secure them in place. it took curt about 6 hours to get the monsters off the wood floors. i followed behind with my chisel and hammer to get off what he couldn't. many blisters and sore wrists later (and my knees!) the living room is sans that 60's glow of cork tile...