A rug for the living room

I alway got the impression that after building a house or room, and decorating it, the fun part began. Well, guess what ... I find it the hardest part so far :')
So many chooses, about colour and style, decicions to make, what to do when. I've known from the beginning that I want to have rugs in most of the rooms of the cottages. Lots of work, but I like cross stitching and I have splenty of time before a room is done.
But ... to know the colours for the rug, I'd need to know the style of the room, or at least the colour scheme, and I still don't know (for sure ^^). Same with the size of the rug; I know the furniture I want to place against the walls, but I'm still in doubt about the couch/armstairs.
And so I keep running around in circles; should the rug fit the couch cushions and the curtains or the other way around and so on ;)

My pinterest board with (designs of) rugs and carpets alone has 65 pins and I'm sure I have more (a)
Well, browsing again saturday evening I've found these needlepoint charts, designs by Anna-Carin Betzén, based on full-scale rugs. Her designs are all 1:48 and 1:144 scale, but I looked anyway :)

© Anna-Carin Betzén

I noticed an Afghan rug, circa 1900. It has 49 by 73 stitches and uses only 4 colours. While I was wondering how it would look in other colours I saw a note, saying: "Add more repeats for a larger rug. Many afghan rugs have much smaller octagons, so with more repeats this design could easily work in larger scales."

So I selected DMC embroidery threads in four colours, fabric I already had (might be 16 stitches?)  and started right away :) I figured beginning in one corner would give me an idea of the size and how many times I would have to repeat the octagons. 

When I'd done the top row of the pattern it was 4,5 cm, so I might have to repeat the original designs twelve times :')

Since I didn't want a repeat of the edges everytime I spent an hour copying and pasting in Paint untill I had a design I liked. I can alway decide to add or skip octagons when I've furnished the living room of the cottage :)

Only bad thing about starting right away; I had choosed the colours to match a scrap of the wall paper I used for the living room (left). It matched great in the evening but a lot less in the morning, and then I discovered it wasn't even the right wall paper to begin with (that's the one on the right ^^).

Anyway, I like the colours - and I didn't want to start over :P - so I'll just keep these and we'll see if it will match the living room.

Of course, once started I can never stop until the design and colour scheme starts showing, so ... this is the progress so far :)