You’re visiting an Eichler during an open-house and the agent is bragging about the
“wall-to-wall brand new carpet”? I hope you will give her/him a piece of your mind.

New carpet in an Eichler is bad mojo. At best, the agent and seller are clueless and are genuinely unaware of the non-sense of having carpet in an Eichler (note that this makes the agent an incompetent one). More likely, they’re trying to hide something…

Why are carpet and Eichler a non-sense combination? Because carpeting your slab means that your living space will be better insulated from your heating source (your radiant heat, either the original one or the electrical alternative) than it is from the outside (through your single-pane glass wall)! Think about the overhead costs in your winter heating bill. And I am not even talking about aesthetic considerations or inherent qualities of other types of flooring.

In the house we bought, the carpet was there to hide the ugly truth. And I missed it. I had pulled the carpet in one spot during the visit, and exposed bare concrete (oh joy!). Well, that was just bad luck: this spot was an exception. The rest of the house was covered with badly brittle vynil tiles…

It’s official now: I hate carpets. And especially the standard-issue brown one. I wish to never put my eyes on one of these ever again.

More details on the flooring effort in a subsequent post.