[jyl]

We want some nice rugs for the house. All floors are hardwood. 9' x 12' for living room, 10' x 14' for dining room, 7' x 7' for entry, etc.

Tastes run from Art Nouveau and Arts/Crafts motifs to Oriental patterns.

Have visited some oriental rug stores, taken several rugs home as loaners, hunted through various online stores and 50 of the 150+ eBay pages of rugs.

What do we want out of this? I'm not interested in "collecting" rugs. I assume my kids will have no interest in my stuff when they ship me off to the nursing home. I basically want to cover the floor, with an attractive, deep, and dense pile, that with reasonable care will look good for the rest of my life. I do have a weakness for hand-done things, but am not a nut about it. I don't mind used things.

Am trying to figure out what to do. Insist on Iranian hand-knotted silk/wool with 300 knots/sq in? Okay with Indian hand-knotted wool at 100 kpsi? How about Chinese? Or we could go machine-woven in Bulgaria. Even synthetic. And we could buy at a local rug store, or go the other extreme and snipe on eBay.

The price range encompassed by the various approaches mentioned, for a 9' x 12', seems to be about a >300-to-1 ratio. Yikes.

Any suggestions? I suspect tabs knows a thing or two about rugs, and so do others.

(So, right now, I am leaning toward trying out eBay where ostensibly hand-knotted wool rugs from India seem quite reasonably priced. Maybe I'm just throwing money away?)