As you may remember, back when I was doing the Fall 2018 One Room Challenge, we decided that we would skip the floor renovation portion due to our funds and time. The current situation is that we still don’t have the funds or budget to do a proper, long-term floor, but we did find a great solution!
I was talking to a friend (and my amazing cleaning lady), and she asked what I was going to do about the carpet in this room. Ha. She appreciates how we change things up in here often, and she knows about some big news coming to the Brand*Eye world, so she had to ask. It got me thinking about low cost solutions to make this flooring way better. Before I basically filtered the hell out of it to make it look good on social media š But in reality it was dirty and drab and ugly.
My first thought was to go to Restore. Do you have one of these by you? You should check, because you probably do. It is Habitat for Humanity’s shop where they sell super affordable building materials, housewares, furniture, cabinetry, counter tops, light fixtures, you name it. Anyway, so I was there and found a really dark grey carpet square. You may know the brand name FLOR, which I love. These are similar, but a commercial brand, and I found them for $30 a box. I needed about 7 so it was only around $200. That is a really great deal and less than $1 a sq ft!
The color is called balkan sea and it is a REALLY dark blue/black/grey. It sort of works like a neutral, but in a really funky way. It makes all of the other colors pop!
In order to try to reduce the obviousness of the lines of the tile, we installed them in a staggered pattern (called running bond). It breaks up the lines of each tile so that they aren’t as obvious. Don’t get me wrong, you still can tell, but not as much as if it were a grid!
The install cost was $0. We will spend $35 to have our township haul out the old carpet, but the demo only consisted of labor (removing carpet and staples). Then we swept, vacuumed and installed the carpet squares. They were relatively easy to trim to size with a utility knife and my fabric cutting surface. I say relatively, because Dave was really good at it and I was not. He deserves the credit for most of the labor.
I’d love to know what you think of the new space! The dark flooring really gives it a new vibe, which I dig.
The feather wreath was from a craft store and I stuck it to this mirror with a suction cup hook thing. The bats were just cut from cardstock. Instructions below.
