Hallway Runner with FLOR Tiles – Actually Pulling it Off

This hallway runner project just kept on coming, because even after I finally decided to design my own using FLOR Tiles AND did math and decided on a final design, there was still a lot to do to make my vision a reality.

(Note: I’m going to say a lot of nice things about FLOR in this post, so I want to remind everyone that we don’t do sponsored content so I’m just commenting on my experience as a regular consumer with no bias.)

Ordering Tiles

For those who aren’t super familiar: With FLOR tiles, you pick out a bunch of matching or complementary carpet squares and then lay them into wall-to-wall carpeting or an area rug by attaching them to each other at the corners.  They’re great for high traffic areas (like my hallway) because if something gets dirty you can just take up that individual tile and either clean it or replace it with a fresh one.  It’s also a relatively green product: the carpet is low VOC and when you’re done with it they take them back to recycle them.

Once I had this final design I had to figure out exactly how many of which tiles to order and in what cut.

I started by matching the colors to the Made You Look line, which is the most affordable and comes in a large variety of colors (they call it the “box of crayons”).

I had purposefully made the design to include a lot of strips three squares wide, so that even though my “base” design unit was a 1/9th piece I would be able to do a lot of them as 1/3 cut strips.  I figured this would both be easier to lay out, as well as make the rug more structurally sound than if it were all formed from tiny pieces.

I went through and manually counted out how many of each color and cut I would need, and then multiplied those out to get a final order of the number of tiles.

In most cases, I had a little flex because it didn’t work out evenly so I knew I’d end up with a couple more pieces than needed (because you order by the full tile).  And in the couple cases where it worked out perfectly I added on an extra tile anyway, just in case I messed something up or wanted to have extras on hand to replace damage in the future.

FLOR will cut the tiles into a whole lot of different dimensions for you for a cost of $3.50/tile, which is pretty reasonable.  A younger, brasher me might have decided to save the money by cutting these myself, but I‘ve learned my lesson, so I paid to have them cut.  Good decision.  I could have saved like $100 but at the expense of making the project take 5x longer and not come out as precise.

It was a pretty complicated order, of five colors in two types of cuts each!

I had the fortune of catching a 25% off sale when I was ready to purchase, so the total with shipping was less than $500 for this long runner and many cuts.  (And even without the sale it would have been under $600.)

Installing The Runner

Once it arrived, it only took an afternoon to install, working together.  We started by sorting out the tiles by type and removing tape and stickers from the back.  It hardly looked like enough for the hallway, but we trusted the process!

We then started at the far end and laid out the full pattern, taking extra care in the first few to get the placement and angle exactly right so that we wouldn’t end up with a wonky rug by the time we got to the end.

Once it was all down we still had the expected number of leftovers.  Some of us thought this meant all was good, while some thought that we could have designed a less wasteful pattern 🙂

Then, we went and connected all of the tiny pieces with “FLOR dots” – little stickers than attach to the bottom of each corner to stick them to each other.

We moved progressively down the rug, pulling small parts from the pattern to attach, pressing down firmly on each connection.  It was slow going, because we had to take care to get each one placed exactly right, as small variations would lead to odd gaps and mess up the pattern down the line.

This part felt like it took a long time (even though it really only took about an hour and a half), but I bet it would have felt a lot faster if I hadn’t made a pattern out of such tiny pieces.  There was also carpet fuzz everywhere! Although, again, I am pretty sure this was because of all the extra cuts I had made.

The “dots” take about two hours to get to full stickiness, so we waited until the next day to vacuum.  Here is the final result!

It is definitely a “more is more” kind of rug, and I love it.  As I’ve mentioned before, I really wanted to make this hallway a bright color but had to settle for white with yellow doors, so this scratches a major itch for me to make this transitional space bold and in-your-face.  The pattern is really me and goes well with the rest of our house, but it isn’t totally matchy-matchy.  It brings in a different element, with some black and a more modern pattern.

I also love that the end isn’t a hard stop.  The hallway sort of peters out into the living room with walls ending at different spots, so having the angled ends let me cheat this, which I think looks good.

It’s also really stable.  I was worried it might slip around or be wiggly with so many small pieces joined, but it like it is installed in place.  The bottom is “grippy” and the dots are holding strong, at least for now.

Of course, this only calls into attention more to do in this hallway, with our ugly doors and lack of art on the walls.  Stay tuned!