What is a good carpet choice if I have children and pets?

So one question I get asked is what type of carpet is best if you have pets and kids and an active household. And there are a couple of good choices that you can make.

As far as the build of the carpet you want it to be tighter together, it’s going to be a tougher wearing carpet. The closer those fibers are together the more they will hold each other up instead of if they are further apart they can just lay down.

Another good thing you could pick is we have some carpet with new, this is called lifeguard backing. It’s a waterproof carpet and so when a spill happens on top it won’t come through the bottom so it doesn’t get into your padding or your subfloor.

What’s really good about that, say you have a water spill; it doesn’t really matter if water gets into your padding or your subfloor maybe. But with this what’s nice is that it’s easier to clean up, it’s easier to get all of that moisture out of there and especially with a spill like say milk where it’s going to smell later, this is going to do a nice job of making it so you can really get that all out on the first try.

I think a lot of us have had that situation where you’ve cleaned up a spill and then it comes back the next day especially in the case of coffee or something like that and this eliminates that from happening.

As far as the fiber goes, the actual carpet itself, one good choice you can make is a solution dyed carpet.

Solution dying is when they dye the carpet the color goes all the way through the yarn. It’s like a carrot versus a radish where they radish just colors on the outside and the carrot goes all the way through.

Solution dyed carpets are really like that carrot and you can clean those up with up to half bleach and water and so they are very, very cleanable.

Though some spills like nail polish for instance that you would have a really hard time getting out of regular type of carpet, with a solution dyed carpet, you can get those out but actually using your polish remover.

Most regular carpets, that would take the color out of course so that’s something, those are all carpets to consider when you are doing a whole house or you are doing a house that’s very active and you have kids and pets.