Rugs

The rug under the sofa’s front legs:

is the one that makes a living room look finished. Size it to the furniture rather than the room: with the sofa and armchairs standing on its front edge, the seating reads as one group instead of floating around a mat. A bedside rug goes beside the bed, runners suit hallways and the kitchen, and the coir or rubber doormat at the door is there to scrape shoes. Rugs get chosen with the cushions and curtains of the same room, so bring a photo of those when you go to see one.

Machine-made rugs and hand-knotted wool:

sit at opposite ends. Machine-made rugs, usually polypropylene or polyester, shrug off spills and cost little, but flatten along the walkway within a few years. A hand-tufted rug has a cloth glued over its back, and the latex under that cloth dries out with age. Hand-knotted wool springs back from furniture dents and hides dirt well. Flat-weaves, from cotton dhurries to jute and kilims, have no pile and are often reversible. Shag feels soft and keeps everything that falls into it.

A rug on porcelain tile:

shifts whenever someone steps on its edge, which is how corners curl and people trip. A thin anti-slip underlay cut slightly smaller than the rug fixes both. Washing decides the rest. Cotton flat-weaves, bath mats and small synthetic rugs go in the washing machine or get scrubbed in the laundry sink and dried on the line. A large pile rug or anything in wool should not be soaked like that; those get cleaned in place by a crew with an injection and extraction machine, so ask how it was last done. Jute is the awkward one: it sheds, and water leaves brown marks that never come out, so keep it out of kitchens and bathrooms.

Where a used rug still holds its value:

depends on what it cost new. A machine-made synthetic rug big enough for a living room runs around ₡25,000 to ₡45,000 in the large home stores, and a jute rug of similar size about twice that. With new ones that cheap, a used polypropylene rug has to come in well under them to sell, because its pile is already crushed and nobody knows what was spilled on it. Wool, hand-knotted pieces and good flat-weaves are different: they cost several times as much new and, looked after, outlast the sofa they were bought for.

Turning a second-hand rug over:

shows most of what you need to know. A perfectly even grid on the back and a fringe stitched on afterwards mean machine-made, whatever the listing says about Persia; on a hand-knotted rug the pattern shows almost as clearly on the back, slightly irregular, and the fringe is the end of the warp threads. Fold a corner of a tufted rug: crackling or a fine powder means the latex has gone and tufts will start pulling out. Smell the back rather than the front, and in a dark room run a UV torch over it, since old pet urine glows where the pile hides it. Check too for fading on the side that faced a window and bare patches along the edges of wool, which can mean moth.

Measuring a rug for its listing:

means both directions in centimetres with a tape, because label sizes are often rounded. Copy the fibre content from the back label. Photograph it flat in daylight from above, then the back, each corner and a close-up of the pile where people walked. Say whether pets or smokers shared the house, how it was last cleaned and whether the underlay goes with it. Roll it rather than fold it, and tie both ends. A buyer from Ciudad Quesada who sees the rolled length in your listing knows before setting out whether it fits across the back seat or has to travel on the roof.