My apartment has wood floors which I love even though they're not in perfect shape. What I don’t love is the amount of ‘stuff’ that gets tracked in from outside. Even though I have to walk across my building's entry rugs, and then climb a carpeted staircase and down a carpeted hallway before I get to my unit a lot of stuff gets tracked in on my shoes and boots. It’s winter here in Canada, so there’s the salt and sand that gets thrown down to treat slippery sidewalks and driveways, and the snow that melts and gets everywhere no matter how hard you try to bang it lose before coming inside. When I moved into my apartment the previous owner left behind an entry mat which I used for the first full winter I lived here, but it wasn’t a really great solution – the above mentioned salt, sand and melted snow made a daily mess of my foyer, and I tired quickly of mopping and sweeping it on an almost daily basis, not to mention the damage the stuff was doing to the hardwood.

I looked high and low for a rug I could use in the space, but I had two problems – the room is small (It’s about 5’x8’ but has 6 doors so a 4’x6 rug wouldn’t work) and as is common in old buildings, the floors are uneven. In my foyer the floor in front of my front door rises a bit, which means the addition of a regular, even flat-woven, rug impossible as the door would get stuck.

After a few trials and errors with various rugs I schlepped home on the subway I came to the conclusion that if I wanted something for my floor I’d have to make it myself. After a while Google introduced me to the idea of floor cloths. While I like to consider myself handy and creative, I’m also pretty lazy, so I figured instead of painting a pattern on blank canvas I’d just buy some fabric with a pattern I liked instead.

I found some navy and fuchsia stripped fabric at King Textiles that I quite liked. The only problem was it was a bit stretchy, and not wide enough to fill my odd-shaped foyer. One seam, and some iron-on interfacing and I had the base of my rug. I then quickly hemmed the four edges to make it the right size (I'm a bag blogger and didn’t take any photos – but I’m sure you can imagine it – it’s was very simple).

I could have left it like that, but I wanted my cloth to be somewhat water-resistant as I knew I’d be standing on it in snowy boots. I laid out a big sheet of plastic and then laid my new ‘rug’ on it, and then proceeded to paint it with polyurethane. I had a half can leftover from a previous project and I figured that would be more than enough – I was wrong. The fabric soaked up the urethane like a sponge, so I ended up using another full can.

My next task was figuring out a way to prevent my new rug from sliding all over the place. Traditional rug pads wouldn’t work because they added too much thickness and prevented the door from being opened. I had pinned this on Pinterest sometime last year and I figured it would solve my problem, and it did – sort of.

While the caulking did prevent my new rug from becoming an indoor slip 'n slide it wasn’t ideal for the thin material I was using – after a while the lines of caulk because visible through the fabric, and I worried that eventually there would be permanent wear marks where the caulk was. 

Luckily a while after I started using the mat I was at Ikea when I spotted their extra-thin rug underlay, and it works quite well without adding that dreaded bulk.

What do you think? Would you ever consider trying to make your own rug?