ORC Week 5: Outdoor Buffalo Check Rug

One Room Challenge Week 5

One Room Challenge, My House, Side Porch, Out Door Rug

This side porch project is becoming the place for DIYs I have always wanted to do. Last week it was the kilim sling stool. This week… an outdoor affordable carpet tile rug. My covered side porch is a long narrow space and I really need two odd sized rugs. Over the years I have tried a few store bought options that I ended up returning because they were either too big or too small for the space. An 8×10 is too big. A 5×7 is too small. I decided to set out to figure out a good DIY option that wasn’t time consuming. The solution… outdoor carpet tiles.

Yes, I am talking about the ribbed inexpensive carpet tiles that you ignore when you go to the flooring section in your carpet or home improvement store. These tiles can be installed outside next to a pool. They can be sprayed down with a hose for cleaning.

Last year I was at our local store looking at carpet samples for a client when I ran across this sample board of all sorts of outdoor carpet tile colors. I logged the idea away in my head.

I have done a carpet tile rug before with indoor carpet tiles and I was able to customize the size and design to fit the room perfectly. A few weeks ago I went back to order the tiles and found out you could only buy each in boxes with large quantities. If I were only needing one color that would work but I needed multiple colors so it wouldn’t be affordable and I would have unnecessary excess. The tiles were also 18×18 inch tiles. I needed smaller 12×12 inch tiles to be able to fully get the effect of the pattern. The smaller tiles also were key to fully customize the size of the rug.

I did some research and found these outdoor tiles at FlooringInc. The tiles are $1.42/sqft making one 8X7 rug about $80 and I could buy them individually. The only bummer was there not a white option. The sand color was too biege and the light gray was too gray.

I came across Trulic tiles at Walmart.com. I chose the Ivory color. They are washable so I figured they could work with the outdoor tiles. They were a little more expensive but I was only ordering 12 tiles.

The work of the DIY project is all in the ordering phase. The project is super easy but I would advise having a plan. So…. here is my plan and how I made the rug happen.

Step 1 – Plan your rug

I used photoshop to figure out what I wanted the rug to look, if you don’t have photo shop you could easily just draw it out on a piece of paper.

Based on my plan, I needed the following for ONE rug.

28 Flooring Inc Blue 12×12 Tiles
16 Flooring Inc Ocean Blue 12×12
12 Trulic Ivory Tiles from Walmart or Amazon

The total for one rug was $95.00. I wanted two for my space so I doubled each quantity. Two fully customizable 8X7 outdoor rugs for under $200 to me is an affordable outdoor rug.

Important Color Note: The Ocean Blue on FlooringInc’s website looks light blue (in the left picture it is the second tile from the right) In reality it is a navy blue color. Because of this I ordered the wrong quantities of tile. What I have written above is what I SHOULD have ordered to begin with and what I have now. Ocean blue is the navy color and blue is not navy but more of a bright blue. The rug turned out different than I expected but I still love it.

The Ivory: Is really a cream color and I freaked a little when I opened the box. Once I put the tile with the blue colors it looks white.

Step 2 – Set out the tiles

Do not remove the back and do not install the tiles until you have the rug set where you want it to go. as I laid the tile, I made sure the “ribs” were all going the same direction.

Step 3- Bulk Up Thin White Tiles (optional)

The white tiles were much thinner than the ribbed tiles. This might not bother you but it bothered me.

To fix this, I ran up to my local carpet warehouse and bought some super cheap outdoor carpet tiles. I didn’t care what color they were or size. They were super cheap (32 cents a tile) and super thin. I only needed 24.

These bargain tiles were 18×18 so I cut them down to 12×12 size.

It was like cutting paper it was so easy. If you have to cut your tile you can use scissors.

I used spray adhesive to attach the bottom of the ivory carpet tile to the cheap tile.

Here is the white carpet tile attached to the cheap carpet tile. The cheap carpet tile has the adhesive so when its time to adhere it to the concrete I can. (I might not though… see below)

After about 15 minutes of work the white tiles were back in the rug.

Step 4 – Secure Carpet Tiles

You can secure the carpet tiles the following ways:

remove backing and position in place
use duck tape on the backside to attach the carpet tiles together like these Flor stickers.

Full disclosure: I have not decided which one I will do. My outdoor furniture hasn’t arrived yet so I wanted to wait to get the rug exactly where I wanted it. I will update this post when I decide. I want to keep the option of using these next year as well but I am guessing if they are good enough to stay poolside they may make it through the winter on my covered porch.

I really love how it turned out. It provides such a fun color to the brown unchangeable brick.

The rug you see is actually NOT the full size. Because I ordered the wrong quantities of tiles (due to the color confusion mentioned above) I had to order more of the Blue carpet tile and it has not arrived. There will be one more row of tiles.

I love this product so much I am thinking about using it permanently in my unfinished basement laundry room. I have an old house laundry room that will never be finished and the floor is cold concrete.

Okay, lots to do to get this space ready by next Thursday!

Check out the featured designers and my fellow guest participants. Its fun to see what everyone is doing and how they are pulling it together the last week!