My current house doesn’t have rugs, except for some large textured mats covering most of my entryway and kitchen. Plus a couple small carpet mats in the bathroom.

The entryway/kitchen mats are rubber mats with thin “office carpet” fibers on top. They have a thick textured design for collecting dust/debris from your shoes when you come inside. Which is great for that purpose, but makes them difficult to clean because a vacuum won’t get into the crevices.

Every couple weeks, I vacuum them the best I can (mostly with just the hose attachment), then hang them outside on a clothing line and beat the crap out of them until they stop dropping dust.

For the bathroom mats, I just run a vacuum over them. Once every couple months, I’ll throw them in the washer to deep clean, then hang to dry.

Outside of that, most of my house is carpeted. I used to vacuum weekly because I had two dogs that shed frequently. Once a year, I’d rent a carpet cleaner and soap/wet vac the carpets.

But a few things have changed in recent years.

1.) My dog that shed the most passed away, so we don’t have tumbleweeds of dog hair roaming around the house anymore. We have one dog left, a short-hair who sheds very little.

2.) My wife’s monthly allergy shots are finally working, which means she’s not constantly sneezing in the presence of our dog anymore. So keeping a hospital-sterile house isn’t so much of a priority anymore.

3.) My wife is turning into a bit of a hoarder lately, which means we have piles of things she’s been stacking in every room. Various projects she’s interested in, but not fully investing time into, so they’re turning into clutter.

It’s hard to vacuum when you only have narrow paths everywhere. I keep telling her to put things away so we can reclaim the floor space and I can do a full, proper cleaning, but she’s having trouble getting the motivation. And she gets upset if I mess with her stuff, so I can’t help her do it.

So our carpet cleaning has been significantly reduced in recent years. I give it the best vacuum I can maybe once a month currently and we’re basically just waiting on our last (elderly) dog to pass away before tearing out all the carpets and redoing the floors from scratch. It’s not really worth it to soap and wash the carpets now. They’re old and a bit torn and stained in a few places. They really just need a full replacement, and we don’t want our dog to embed hair/dander in new carpets shortly before he passes away.

I’ve always been a huge advocate for carpeted floors. I don’t like how hard and cold the hardwood/laminate/tile floors are. But I guess I wouldn’t be opposed to changing out carpet for mostly solid wood floors.

We have plans for major renovations one day, which involve actually changing the layout of the house a bit. But we don’t currently have money for such a project, so investing in small improvements is always weighed against the overall cost of tearing everything apart and starting fresh.

Would it be worth it to replace a window now if we’re gonna tear down that whole wall one day? Should we replace a faucet if we’re going to replace the entire bathroom counter and sink? Should we replace the carpets if we’re just gonna tear out the floors and rebuild them later? These questions have kept us from acting until we have money saved up for such large-scale projects.