Rainbow hallway runner will make your day

Guest post by Alice N.
#Decor & Decorating#carpets/rugs#great-ideas#hallway#rainbow

tonight's projectRemember when Alice shared her de-beige-ified rental kitchen? Well she’s added a butt-ton of color to her hallway, too — with this awesome pants rainbow runner!

I begged her for more details on how she achieved this rainbow hallway look, and she divulged the goods:

At almost 30 inches wide, it was hard to find a rug for this hallway. Our lease, like most San Francisco leases, mandates that we cover 80% of the hardwood floors with carpet, so leaving it empty wasn’t really an option. You can buy big rolls of carpet from home depot and similar places, but they’re all either really expensive or really, really ugly. While not actually cheap, this was not too bad considering the area covered (about 70 square feet).

The rug is made of tiles from Flor — nine different colors from the “Feelin’ Groovy” line. Each tile is 19″ square, and the full rug is 1.5 tiles wide and 17 tiles long (2.3′ by 27′). It took us maybe an hour and a half to install them — pretty easy.

The tiles are stuck together on the bottom with these adhesive dots that come with the tiles, but you can totally rearrange them later (and stick them together with more of the dot things). Since we’re likely to move within a year, this is good news for us. Depending on what our future home looks like, they might stay as a hallway rug, or get rearranged into something more rectangular to act as an area rug. We’ll see!

This leaves me wondering… how did YOU cover your narrow hallways?

Guest Post By: Alice N.

Comments on Rainbow hallway runner will make your day

    • Thanks! We like it 🙂

      I think the covering hardwood floors thing is mostly about noise – many of the buildings are from around 1900, aand don’t have much if any sound insulation in the floors. It might also be a floor condition thing though – renters rights in SF specify that landlords can’t charge for “normal wear and tear” when you move out, so it’s in their interest to prevent damage. Either way, it’s pretty standard for leases here in older buildings.

  2. That is awesome!

    Before I moved in, we actually ripped up the ugly lino from the hallway and my dad scraped off the glue. The wood hasn’t been refinished but it’s still much nicer. No need to cover that up! (Except with a laundry hamper and our ferret’s play box.)

  3. This post changed my life. STEALING THIS!!

    Also Laura: I know that buildings in lots of different cities have hardwood floor rules. It’s a neighbor noise issue — shoes clomping around on wood flooring can be LOUD.

    • Please do! Maybe if more people buy rugs (and other furnishings) in ACTUAL COLORS it’ll be easier to find them!

      Of course if I had an infinite budget I’d be filling my home with rugs like this. There’s always something more awesome to lust after…

    • We priced out a ton of different area rugs, and aside from the “Ikea Special” rugs that are like $100, we found the Flor tiles to not be that much more expensive. The one we went with worked out to $3.60 per square foot.

      A big win for us is that you can actually pick up a tile and wash it off or replace it entirely if something tragic happens to it.

      Obviously it depends on what style / fiber / size you’re going for, but it worked out great for our living room.

    • I’d love to offer the encouragement here to move beyond decreeing things as “expensive.” Offbeat Home has a wide, diverse readership ranging from those of us who are unemployed and completely broke to those of us who work 80 hours a week and squirrel money into savings. I toooootally get that not everything we post on the site is going to fit with everyone’s budgets, but I do wish we could move beyond dismissing things outright as “really expensive.”

    • Thanks!

      We definitely deliberated for a while about spending the money – I didn’t love the idea of spending Real Money (about $350 I think?) furnishing and area I didn’t really “use”. But with the exception of things like this, we really couldn’t find a whole lot that would cover the whole area for less money.

      We’ve done the cheap ikea (or similar) route before in other apartments, but always wound up selling the rugs when we moved because we just didn’t like them very much. And it wasn’t that cheap – by the time you’ve got enough little rugs to cover the whole area, and some kind of anti-slide stuff to keep them from moving all the time, you’re looking at $100-$150 for a hallway this size. Since we have some disposable income right now and can save up for stuff like this, we decided it was time to bite the bullet and buy something we actually LIKED, and that we’d take with us when we move next. I guess we’d have to move twice for it to actually be “cheaper”, but since it makes me SO. DAMN. HAPPY. every time I walk through there, I’m going to call it even. (Also note that we finally bought these about four months after moving in, violating our lease for a while and getting some “reminder” emails about the rug requirement, presumably because the downstairs neighbor complained about noise. We took our time.)

  5. I love your rug! What a great idea for fitting a weird space. We’ve also used Flor tiles: easy, adaptable, and good quality. It’s nice that one individual tiles can easily be swapped out if they get damaged–much cheaper and more eco-friendly than replacing an entire rug.

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