Keeping It Natural: Earth Weave Carpet Review

Yesterday I shared all about having our hardwoods refinished with a nontoxic finish and today we’re moving to the upstairs and talking carpet! I’ll share the pros and cons of natural carpet and padding, along with my Earth Weave Carpet review. Also, a lot of you sent me really great questions about the carpet while we were renovating and I’ll answer as many as I can within this post.

(the photos below are unedited to show the true colors in different lighting)

Let’s Talk Carpet…

It’s not a secret that carpet is no friend to those with allergies as it attracts dust, dust mites, pet dander, mold spores, and more. What’s worse is that most carpet brands use a number of different chemicals during manufacturing and also can add moth repellent pesticides, flame retardants, and stain treatments, which are usually toxic PFAS.

(note: Home Depot has pledged to stop selling carpet and rugs containing PFAs sometime this year. It’s unclear if another substance will replace it as a stain repellent)

The right kind of carpet can solve most of those issues.

While we originally decided to go with hardwoods in most of the upstairs, when some subfloor issues were discovered we completely ditched the idea of hardwoods, as the easiest thing was to stick to carpet throughout the upstairs. Of course, I did a deep dive on carpet and researched until found one that was durable, safe, and offered some benefits without the added chemicals. After exploring several natural carpet brands, we landed on Earth Weave because of the price, color & texture selections, and it was totally untreated with any chemicals.

Earth Weave Carpet Review

Why Earth Weave?

• It’s truly eco-friendly and biodegradable
• 100% untreated, natural materials with no added chemicals
• Priced well
• Lasts much longer than synthetic carpets
• Their wool is from free-range sheep
• Wool is naturally flame-resistant, has antibacterial and antimicrobial properties, and creates a harder environment for dust mites to thrive.

Our Thoughts

It’s been nearly 4 weeks since the carpet was installed and overall, we’re very pleased with how it turned out. We went with the Rainer line in the color Snowfield. It looks light but in person, it’s your typical lighter, beige carpet. There’s some color variation from loop to loop so hopefully, that will help disguise any wear and tear.

I want to point out that virtually all of the organic, non-toxic, and/or wool carpets we looked at all had mostly closed loops like a Berber style carpet. The Rainier collection has both cut and closed loops and felt really soft and dense on the sample, but still has a nice tailored look. Since it does have a lot of closed loops, our installer explained that seams will always be more prevalent with that style, though he tried to lay it in such a way that the seams wouldn’t be in prominent areas. Earth Weave has one collection, the Catskill line, with mostly cut loops.

Can you spot the seam? This is one of the more obvious ones.

While it’s dense and soft, the carpet is quite short. So much so that we now need to have most of our upstairs baseboards repainted, since you can see the line from the original dark-stained wood trim. This is probably not a problem for most people, but something to note for those who’ve changed the color on their baseboards.

Earth Weave Padding

While we love the carpet, I have mixed thoughts on the padding. It’s super thin and with the carpet also being thin, it’s a big change from the relatively plush carpet and padding we had before. I do love that it’s entirely wool and biodegradable, but in hindsight, I wish I’d gotten a sample of it first and perhaps explored some other options. That being said, it was well priced and it made things much easier to have the carpet and padding shipped to the same terminal to be picked up by our installer.

No Added Chemicals Or Treatments

I was surprised to find the carpet and padding had almost no smell at all. Especially since we visited our neighbors the day they had new carpet (this was conventional carpet) installed a couple of years back. It had such an intense smell that the installers had left the windows open.

Earth Weave’s wool is completely untreated and dye-free, except for their Catskill line which uses an organic dye. The rest of the lines are created with just the natural colors in wool.

They do not use pesticides like moth repellents, which a few people asked me my thoughts about. Since we already have several rugs, curtains, pillows, and even some furniture made from wool and we haven’t had any issues with moths in our home, I feel very comfortable using it. If you have problems with moths, you may want to speak directly with Earth Weave to see if they have any recommendations.

Durability/Stain Resistance

According to Earth Weave their carpet lasts up to 20-25 years. It feels pretty durable to us so far, but I will update this as time passes. Wool is known as one of the most durable natural fibers that retains its shape well, so hopefully, it will last a while. It’s held up really well with the kids running and playing, and even with Frankie’s nails.

By request, our back staircase. The carpet installed very neatly here and has held up well. You can see the paint problem due to the shorter carpet here, too.

Would you believe that within a few days after just having it installed we managed to get red wine, mud, and urine on it?? The dog is mostly to blame, but the red wine was Teddy! We are always so careful upstairs and I can’t remember the last time any of that happened on the old carpet! I guess we unintentionally were putting it through a stain test (with me cringing in the background the whole time). I’m happy to report it all came out ok!

It seems it is somewhat moisture resistant & stain resistant.

The red wine was kind of funny. Since we had no furniture downstairs (from refinishing the hardwoods) we headed upstairs to watch a movie and Teddy debated for a while about having a glass of wine because he was nervous about getting red wine on the new carpet. He decided to do it and wouldn’t you know, he spilled some. It was just a few drops but it beaded up on the carpet and I was able to quickly get a towel and dab it up. We were both amazed and relieved when we saw no trace of it left!

I wasn’t sure what to do about the mud, as my attempts to wipe it up seemed to push it further into the carpet. Instead, I waited a bit for it to dry and then vacuumed it up without any stains left behind.

The urine was tougher since there was more of it and I wasn’t able to get to it immediately as I did with the wine. I used towels to absorb as much as I could and then used water with a tiny amount of dish soap to kind of flush it out. I would pour some on, absorb it up, then pour more on until I felt the urine was gone. There isn’t any staining or odor left behind.

How To Purchase Earth Weave Carpet

Though they don’t sell direct to the public, you can contact Earth Weave to see if there are any local carpet stores that carry them. They did direct us to a store here, which was helpful for looking at samples, but the installation prices were very high so ultimately we purchased online through organicandhealthy.com and found our own installer.

I have to give a huge shout out to organicandhealthy.com. I don’t even know how many emails and phone calls we exchanged but they were SO helpful with answering questions, figuring out quantities, and finding a local shipping terminal (these huge rolls need a lift gate so they can’t be delivered to residential addresses unless you’re receiving a small amount). It can be scary to make such a large purchase online but they were so responsive and helpful. I highly recommend their store and will seeking them out for future home purchases.

Overall

The carpet looks and feels wonderful. It’s so soft and not scratchy at all, as I feared wool would be. I’ve been doing a side deep dive on the benefits of wool (this post was long enough without going into that), but the more I research, the more impressed I am with its benefits for your home and health. We’re relieved to have the old gross carpet out of here and have nice, natural wool carpet instead.

If there’s anything I didn’t cover in my Earth Weave Carpet review, just leave a comment below!

***2 Year Update**

We still really love the carpet and it’s held up well. We haven’t had issues with Frankie’s nails snagging the carpet or any type of wear and tear, really. The padding remains my one regret, though my mom used some of our extra pad for an area rug and it seems really well suited for that.

Almost all stains have come up quite easily, with exception of 2:

A doggy accident on a rainy day (after refusing to go out all day). I can still see a faint yellow tint there. I’ve tried a few things, but may get one of those spot carpet cleaner machines and see if that works. *One previous accident cleaned up just fine.

The other is from pencil shavings that somehow spilled out when Carson and a friend were playing. The details have seemed a bit hazy, but apparently they tried to clean it themselves which was basically them rubbing it into the carpet more and now we have a gray cloud there. Nothing has worked! But pretty sure that would be an issue on any type of carpet.