Well, if you HAVE to do carpet, berber is the way to go, if you ask me. Mine is about 12 yrs old, not the most expensive you can get, and it's not threadbare yet, lol.

It's basically made from recycled soda bottles . Pretty hard to stain.
It's what gets into the pad that gets you. - it'll keep *wicking* back up, you can clean over and over, and it'll come back up.

It holds the allergens down so they don't fluff all over in the air. If you don't sweep all the time, it actually can help by keeping stuff out of the air. That's most of the reason I had the carpets instead of the dusty wood I had to mop all the time - plus padding the kids' falls.

Now, I'm just kind of tired of the steaming carpet, you know? Now we can use a steam mop on wood, so that's easier. The kids still fall, lol.

I'm also going to look at other types of floors. Bamboo and cork sound interesting for certain areas and they look cool. I'm not sure they'd look good here, though.