The Rug Conundrum

Now that our floors are nearly finished, we have a slight conundrum... do we get an area rug for the dining room?

By the way, last night Bill finished up the floor in the dining room except for a difficult piece or two, and we got the china cabinet and the curio cabinet moved back in place and re-loaded.  It was nostalgic to wash dishes by hand the last few days, but I'm happy to have my dishwasher back. :-)

So, back to the issue... to rug, or not to rug?

Our main reason for potentially wanting a rug is that the dining room will be very woody.  All our furniture in there is wood (with the exception of the cat perch and the frog tank, though it's on a wood buffet for a stand) so the room is going to be very monochomatic - blue walls with brown furniture and floor.  Plus it'll be more echo-y with no soft surfaces except the curtains on the window.

But, if we do get a rug, what size?  How far should it stick out around the table?  We don't want it in our main walking path through there as a tripping hazard.  Plus the floors are so pretty we don't want to cover up the entire thing!  To help decide this, we'll try out our living room rug in there and see how it fits.  There are really only like 2 sizes of area rugs, so it's either this size or the next one up.

And, what color or pattern should the rug be?  The dining room has a different color scheme than the living room, so we'd probably want something different than what we got for in there.  The walls are royal blue, the trim and ceiling are white, the curtains are tan, and all the wood (floor and furniture) is a medium oak-ish color.  What color rug would go well with that?

One potential solution for solving this problem is a new "toy" I've found... Google SketchUp.  It's a free 3D modeling program, and I downloaded it a few weeks ago to play around with.  I drew up my office and all its furniture in it to play around, and it's really awesome!  You can even easily do textures like wood grain and such.  So I'm thinking I just might draw up the dining room sometime this week and see how it looks.  (If I can find a way to post a model online for you I will).

But beyond that, what are your thoughts?  I'd love some help on this one!  Theoretically tonight we'll be able to get the rest of the area back in some semblance of order, so I should be able to post more pictures for you to see the relatively final look.  Please post a comment or send me an email with your decorating tips on this!