Carpet Shopping! (With helpers...)

So, as you may have noticed in the variety of pictures on the blog, our carpeting is not, um, new.
Or attractive. Or clean - or cleanable.

It's about 17 years old. Maybe older, I can't remember.

The living room carpet has been through a lot of work boot imprints, bare feet, paws, 1 kitten, 4 very old or very sick cats, a leaking fish tank, a couple of escaped fish (no, the cats didn't go fishing - the escapee fish were jumpers), a lot of sneaker-scuffs, pretty regular drips from the DH's meals in front of the TV (a few from me as well, but I tend to wear my food...), cat nip blizzards, visitors (2-legged, 4-legged, and a variety of arachnid-legged types), broken glass from the front window along with scuff marks from the big rock that the vandal heaved through said window, fireplace ash, 1 melted spot from a leaping spark,  A LOT of vacuuming, 1 Chem-dry cleaning, 1 marking (not the cute kind) from Bob-Cat pointedly expressing his dislike of the smell of Chem-dry, several rounds of steam-cleanings, lost beads and the occasional pin from crafting projects, A LOT of Christmas and Birthday presents wrapped on that carpet, a ton of spot-cleaning, near-constant kitty play, baths, or naps on the carpet, some yoga-with-cats by myself, DH-napping during movies, and lastly - it is my seat of choice - I usually sit on the floor.

Last year, I suggested we change out the carpeting.
This year, the DH embraced the idea and we went carpet shopping.
We found some samples we liked and brought them home to check with our furniture - and pretty much everybody "helped" in the review process.

Yes, we stored the samples in the Laundry Room overnight so they wouldn't look like our old carpeting when we returned the samples to their owners the next day.
Yes, we made an attempt to clear off the residuals from the cat frolicking but since one carpet-gent asked if one of my cats was black - we obviously weren't entirely successful in the de-fuzzing.

The DH, who had this last week off work,  has packed up about half of my books and all of our movies that are stored in the living room shelves. (Kudos and thanks to the mostly patient DH.)
I'm becoming slightly less panic-stricken about his efforts (he does best packing standard-sized books) and it's generally agreed - I pack the breakables like my curios, my mother's china and my grandmother's tea set.
(If I break my stuff, it's my own fault. If he breaks my stuff, I have to be relatively nice about it. That would be extremely hard - I'm just not that good a person.) 

The carpet should be installed in 2 weeks.
I have to wonder if the cats will find the wall-to-wall version as interesting as the samples?