My daughter asked me to make a thread about this because I told her a story from when I visited London (a quarter of a century ago) and she doesn’t believe me.
Do you have carpet in your bathroom and/or kitchen?
And I am not talking about a mat or rug, I mean proper carpeted floor.
If not:
That used to be a thing though, right?
I distinctively remember seeing it (and to be honest being weirded out by it a bit) and my classmates (it was a school trip and two or three of us each stayed with some family for those three days) reported the same from other families’ homes.
And I am also pretty sure that I only ever saw it in the UK.
So yeah, is that still a thing? My daughter thinks I am full of it.
Maybe carpet was just an older style, from the 80s or so. The people in… “Morden” I think… weren’t exactly wealthy it seemed, so their houses looked like straight from the 80s inside. Quite cozy though.
The house we had in San Antonio TX that was built new in '88 had carpet in the bathrooms. It had carpet everywhere but the kitchen actually. So if was definitely a things on this side of the pond for a while.
We have zero carpet and, living on a rural property that was a deliberate choice - tiles for the laundry, bathroom and ensuite, bare wood flooring everywhere else.
The laundry even has its own drain and doubles as a ‘mud room’ and although it is the ‘back’ door, is the primary entrance.
Sounds like our place. Utility room is the main entrance because there’s an adjoining bathroom with shower. Muddy/wet stuff off, shower and into the main house. No carpets anywhere.
I think kitchen/bathroom carpets with the boomer generation in the UK was because they grew up with no central heating. Coal fires and old draughty 30’s housing. A lot of UK housing of that time had suspended floors downstairs which wasn’t damp proofed or insulated. Floorboards would allow draughts through.
A friend of mine had a house built in the 50’s, the air space under the dining room and kitchen was filled with soil and he’d regularly have garden worms come through the carpet. Eventually he ripped up the carpet/floor etc and took several tonnes of earth out.
Building regs have changed a lot since then and now stipulate concrete raft and a lot of insulation.
The house we built in 1976 had indoor/outdoor carpet in the kitchen and bathrooms. The rest of the house had shag carpeting.
It was already pretty normal in the 1970’s in the area of the Midwest where I lived at the time. As was each room having its own paint and carpet color instead of a single color throughout the house.
We tried really hard not to judge, but honestly: the amount of dirt and humidity and whatever follows those really made me question that decision.
Especially when we watched the dogs and the cat eat their buttered toasts (yes, everyone got one for breakfast. Watching the cat carrying it around was funny) on the carpet as well…
Back then we filed it under “OK, brits are weird I guess”, but now I discovered that it goes deeper than that. I have to investigate further!
Can confirm carpet in the bathroom. There was carpet in the bathroom at my wife’s house until I turned up from Australia. It was gone very quickly. It is out of fashion nowadays but was a thing.
really made me question that decision.
