Many people who have just added a brand new hardwood floor or even laid carpets throughout the house like to include added protection to preserve their new floors. Their answer is to place runner rugs over the top of their floor. Runner rugs are designed as long and thin rugs made to be walked on and are often used in hallways, stairs and other parts of the home that gets a lot of traffic.

As well as being used to protect the floor, these rugs serve an added function of muffling footsteps down hallways. Because the hall is often a place that echoes loudly and generally takes you past bedrooms, the sound of someone coming down the hall would be quite noisy without a soft surface to mask the sound.

One of the most luxuriant types of rugs is a runner rug made of wool. Wool runner rugs are soft and thick and because of the length of some of them, you get to enjoy walking on them for a reasonable length of time.

The primary purpose of runner rugs is as a covering for the floor but there are some incredibly detailed patterns and designs that go into these rugs. Traditional rug making applies just as completely to the creation of runner rugs as it does to the manufacture of accent rugs. This means that your runner rug can become an important decorative feature in the house. More so because the runner will be one of the first things a visitor will see when they enter the house.

By making a careful selection of the color scheme for your runner rug it can be used as a preview of what to expect further on in the house. In fact, as long as the rug performs its job of leading you in through the hall and to the rest of the house, you can be confident that you have bought an appropriate runner.