Dog-Driven Home Decisions
Having a dog in the house means we’re forced into some decor and design decisions we might not otherwise make - and I don’t just mean the obvious ones like dealing with dog hair all over… well, everything, making sure there’s room for a dog bed in the living room, and finding a spot for the food and water dishes in the kitchen. No, it also means keeping the trash and recycling cans just inside the doorway to the basement because behind a door is the only place Charlie won’t be able to get to them - “locked” styles are no match for his persistence - and not placing anything breakable on surfaces at tail-wagging height.
(Okay, that second one is kid-related, too, but the dog dictated my tchotchke purchases before we had children!)
For now, I don’t mind. I know it won’t be forever: this is morbid, but the fact is that Charlie will be 13 in a few months and, while he’s in great shape for a senior dog, he is still quite old as Labradors go. In addition to that, I don’t yet feel like I’m furnishing/decorating my grown-up home despite, thanks to the mortgage we locked in when we refinanced in 2020, this being our forever home. In my mind, our grown-up home is the one we’ll move back into after we do our major renovation, not the one we’re in now. (My friend Heather has written some great posts on the self-imposed pressures of a forever home and on future-proofing one’s home. When I have the bandwidth, I want to draft some real responses to them to publish here!) The result is that there are a lot of things I want in/for our grown-up home that I’ve been holding off buying and/or intalling.
One of those things is a stair runner. I’d love a classic runner custom-fitted to our staircase but, since it’ll have to come up when we renovate and I don’t want to spend money on the same item twice, I was going to wait until afterwards.
And then Charlie started slipping on the stairs. He’s old and labs often have hip issues as they age so it’s not surprising, but it made me realize that we needed a something on the stairs sooner rather than later.
I did a lot of research online to find a a store or site with stair treads that I liked and that didn’t cost a fortune and, ultimately, landed on House Home & More. I measured our stairs and ordered a set of 15 treads in an unobtrusive color - praline brown - and a matching runner for the entrance hallway at the foot of the stairs to replace the dying Ikea runner we bought when we moved into the house. (I can attest to HH&M’s excellent customer service because I didn’t measure the width of the hallway and ordered a too-small runner; I tried to live with it for three weeks before admitting that I’d made a mistake, emailing the company about returning and exchanging it, and getting a bigger one that fits perfectly.) We’ve had the treads and runner in place for six weeks now, and I wish I’d ordered them sooner!
They feel so soft underfoot, which is wonderful. They haven’t moved an inch - we got the kind that has adhesive on the short ends and a non-slip backing between the strips - and Charlie hasn’t slipped once since we put them down. And, unexpectedly, I like the aesthetic! I was resigned to them looking temporary and, while I do want a custom-fitted runner that extends into our upstairs hallway once we move back in after the renovation, I definitely don’t feel like we’ve settled for now.
