The sun is shining, the Red Sox are exploding with runs, and are tied for 1st place in the American League East, and, we love our new carpets!  So this is the end of the carpet saga, at least for the time being.  Here are some photos of the carpet in the galley and the saloon.  You can see our lovely floor too.  Now I have to find some pillow covers for the small pillows on the saloon settee.  My red/blue/gold elephant motif ones made from a skirt bought in Singapore just don’t go.  Maybe I’ll find some with whirling dervishes on them.  The "in the mean time" ones are from a shop in Miri, Borneo, Malaysia and though the colors go better, I never really liked them.

Ru

DoraMac  (not Dora mat) as everyone here seems to hear when we say our boat name over the morning Net! 

Carpets on DoraMac

The Galley Runner

The dimensions of this carpet were the hardest to find so we always started our search looking for the galley carpet. This carpet has to deal with the messiest parts of daily boat life: the refrigerator, stove, sink and engine room. The refrigerator is at the far end on the left across from the stove. The white door on the left opens to the engine room. The stove and sink are on the right. Randal is very careful bringing anything in and out of the engine room but sometimes the water hose is brought into the boat from the sink porthole over the galley floor to the engine room. And the wet/dry vacuum is emptied into the galley sink. I’m careful defrosting the frig, but there always seems to be water on the floor sometime during the process. So not only were size, color and pattern factors, but here cost was too. When we saw this carpet we both really liked it. The galley gets little natural light; just one small porthole over the sink, so we needed something bright.

Saloon

After we picked the galley runner we needed to choose a saloon carpet. I said I wanted a different pattern so it didn’t look as if we went into a carpet shop and bought carpets. We wanted our long search to show. But after looking at different carpets we really liked this one best so stuck with it for the saloon and the small carpets too. We wear our shoes on the boat so needed carpet everywhere we were likely to step. But they feel good under your bear feet. One carpet shop told us that carpets are treated three ways: flipped over until company comes and then turned right side up; socks carpets, and the third was either bare feet or boots. Big difference there but I can’t remember. I’ll have to find out. Ours will have the hard life of “boots.” A truly well made carpet looks really good on both sides and the more the underside looks like the topside, the better the carpet. The $2,000 galley runner was quite lovely on its underside because there were more knots per square inch.

We have two small rugs that are just about the same but one had a more circular design if you can see it. Anyway, the darker one is face up and the other faces down so you can see. The $2,000 runner looked just about the same up or down.

Looking down into the saloon.

In anticipation of the carpets’ arrival we pulled up our “industrial wall to wall” tan carpet and vacuumed and washed down the floor. It felt good to do that! But then there was way, WAY too much wood floor to look at. I think Randal and I were a bit nervous how it was all going to look. But when the carpets arrived and we put them down, it felt like “home!” We like the way they look. We like the way they feel under our bare feet. We like that the price was right for boat living and we can relax when someone spills red wine the first time. And now visitors on the boat can also see our lovely floor. Some boats don’t have wood floors so carpets cover up what is there. Our industrial carpet was covering a lovely teak floor. When cruisers would come by Doramac and ask about her and be invited in for a tour, we always tried to remember to turn up an edge of the carpet to show the floor. Now they can see it. And, as hard as it may be for some of you to believe this, I will enjoy cleaning the floors because it’s soap and water and not a noisy vacuum cleaner.

The color and motif of the carpets is Kayserium from Kayseri, not Hereke as I said earlier. We like carpets from both areas. The flower pattern is a traditional motif from Kayseri.

“Located on the main trade and caravan roads (Kayseri on Silk Road), Kayseri has been a great center of weaving and rug trade. The people of Kayseri have great reputation all over Turkey as talented weavers as well as great merchants. Being a real melting pot on the caravan and trade roads, Kayseri rugs offer great variety of designs and colour combinations which are influenced by Gördes and Iranian carpets. In pure silk and wool and cotton combinations Kayseri rugs are considered second most famous center after Hereke. Kayseri Silk, pure silk, Kayseri carpets, Kayseri on Silk Road, wool and cotton in Kayseri”

http://www.turkishcarpetsguide.com/kayseri.htm The blurb from Britannica said Kayseri is more famous now cranking out carpets for the tourist market. I guess both are correct. I also read one really knowledgeable carpet site that said, “Set a price, find what you like, buy it, enjoy it, and don’t worry.” That’s what we did.