I Finally Put a Rug Under My Kitchen Table and My Only Regret Is That It Took Me So Long

For as much as I write and edit stories singing the praises of putting rugs down in kitchens and dining rooms, it took me a stupid amount of time to come up with the idea for my own home. See, my husband and I bought a 300-year-old stone house three years ago. We moved in, hoping to renovate the kitchen and dining room some day. Those rooms have exterior walls — and the now-canceled DIY Network show, Stone House Revival, got us excited to get the shoddy beadboard and drywall down and expose the stone in those rooms.

Of course, that takes time and money, so it’s on the way, way back burner for now. But that meant the dining room was kind of in limbo. We swapped out the light fixture, got some furniture, and decorated a little, and didn’t put much more thought into it. The room never felt finished, and I had just grown to accept that it wouldn’t until we could get around to renovating it.

Then it hit me: WE NEEDED A RUG. For starters, it would help the room look more lived in. It would also help protect the floors, which are original to the house and had started to get marks from the chair legs (even with little feet protectors!).

I think the thing that held us back in the first place was that we knew we’d have to get an old rug. One that went with the house. We go antique-hunting almost every weekend, but I hate looking through piles of rugs. They’re heavy, hard to browse, and usually very dirty. So I eventually turned to Revival Rugs, an incredibly well-curated website that sells one-of-a-kind, handmade vintage rugs from Turkey. Every rug on the site gets cleaned and fixed up and, when necessary, dyed again to highlight special features. If all of this has you seeing dollar signs, know that the mark-up is very minimal and prices are super reasonable, all things considered. There are certainly some large rugs in the thousand-dollar range, but mine was just $604 (for a rug that’s nearly 6 feet by 9 feet!).

You can shop the site by style, size, color — and then you can set price ranges, too. Just know that, because these are one-of-a-kind rugs, you should buy anything that speaks to you when you see it. There’s no guarantee someone else isn’t looking at the same rug! Our rug arrived promptly, folded up in a suitcase-shaped box, nice and clean and looking almost as good as new. I mean, it looked old, but in exactly the way I wanted it to! And you don’t even need an old house to make a Revival rug work. One would look great in traditional house, a modern house, a rustic house … you get my point.

(In case you’re wondering, our dining chairs are from Anthropologie. They’re not available anymore, but Target has some similar options here.)

Not only does our new rug fit in with the space and help tie the room together (with itself and the rest of the house!), but there’s also one little bonus: Our pup, Millie, now happily sits underneath the table while I do work or entertain our friends. Before, she used to sit on the couch in the other room and even her own dog bed couldn’t entice her to come in. So I’d call this rug a win for the floors, the room, us, and the doggo.