Borris mat modular carpet squares

Jari B needed carpets and found a cheap solution using Borris door mats.

"I needed some kind of floor covering for the kitchen area in my tiny apartment, and having recently moved, I'm on really tight budget at the moment. My kitchen is right near the entryway, so it's also serves as a high traffic area. I wanted something durable, perhaps indoor/outdoor, washable, and that could withstand the abuse of high traffic and the occasional kitchen mishap.




I also wanted something with a dark muted tone, a modern utilitarian aesthetic and hopefully cost $30 or less. Although I love the look of sisal, these aren't cheap, and my past experience has been, one errant glass of wine and they become permanently tatooed. Nappy style carpeting in the kitchen is a little, ew to me.

I was in my local Ikea browsing the rug section, and not really liking any of the available options, when I spotted a big pile of  these $1.99 Borris door mats. I immediately thought I could repurpose these into modular carpet tiles, similar to the more pricey FLOR carpet tiles that CB2 sells. The Borris mats seem durable, are hand washable, have a grippy latex backing that really helps keeps them from sliding, and on top of it all they have a really nice subtle stripe texture, and an attractive charcoal/navy muted color.

For this project: I marked and trimmed 1 3/4" strip off of each side of mat to remove the rounded corners using a sharp utility knife- a brand new blade helps. I wasn't sure if fraying was going to be a problem, so i carefully dabbed a tiny bit of Aleenes clear washable fabric glue along the cut edges with my finger,  which should prevent any fraying. For my sizing purposes I chose to leave the mats as rectangles rather than cut them into perfect squares, like the CB2 tiles. The only other thing I did was run a strip of gaffers tape on the back of mats along the edges to help keep them together. For my kitchen project I used 8 mats which cost me a total of $17.33 including tax.

I'm happy with the way this project turned out, and it's huge improvement over the bare, creaky old wood floor. I'm sure my downstairs neighbors appreciate the extra soundproofing as well. The rug also helps to psychologically demarcate the kitchen as a separate area of my home, as it shares the same room as my home office and bedroom."