Hallway Runner with FLOR Tiles – The Plan

Thank you to everyone who gave advice to help me solve the quandary of the hallway runner rug, one of the most intractable problems that has plagued this house since we first started to decorate it five years ago.

For those who don’t remember, the quandary is actually pretty simple: the hallway is about 28 feet long.  I want a statement rug but it is simply impossible to find one that I like of that length that is anywhere near affordable.  I was considering three options when I asked for your advice, and you gave a pretty clear answer!

I was surprised that so many people were into the idea of designing my own with FLOR Tiles, but I was thrilled because deep down that was where I was leaning, too.  You also brought up some great points about the three coordinating rugs sliding around all the time, which I hadn’t thought of.

FLOR Tiles it was!  Decision made, project done, right?

Nope.  This option is a great one because it is so customizable but that also means that picking it was only the start of the work to get an awesome runner for the hallway.  While I liked some of their stock designs, I knew that I wanted to do my own thing and make something perfect for my particular house.

If you’re not familiar with it, the idea behind FLOR Tiles is that you buy “squares” of carpet in any number of styles and colors and can put them together (connected at the corners) to create area rugs or wall-to-wall carpeting.  You can also get them cut to different dimensions to enable even more patterns.

To make my own design, I wanted to work with the “Made You Look” line, which is both the most affordable and comes in the widest variety of plain colors.  But first, I had to figure out the dimensions I was working with.

(Beware, the following includes math.)

Making a Template

My hallway is 42″ wide and 26′ 9″ long.  Each FLOR tile is 19.7″ x 19.7″ (50 cm x 50 cm).  Laying them 2 wide would fill nearly the whole floor space, with only an inch or so of space on either side.  This wasn’t the look I was going for, so I started playing around with alternatives.

After using the Pythagorean Theorem in my real life, I found that one tile at a 45 degree angle plus another 1/9th would get me to the ideal width for the hallway:

Of course, that doesn’t lend itself to a nice, even rug, so I decided to embrace that fact.  The whole point of doing this with FLOR tiles is to make something fun!  I opted for an asymmetrical layout made up of tiles cut into 1/9ths:

(The grayed out portion shows how a single tile compares to the overall pattern.)

Deciding on a Design

Template in place, it was time to have fun with the design.  Unfortunately I found that the Design Studio tool from FLOR couldn’t handle designing something this strange.  (It would probably work OK for designing more standard projects, even though it wasn’t super intuitive to use.)  Instead, I made a ton of designs in my graphic design software using colors that I knew would go with the rest of our house.

As you can see, I had a lot of fun with it and wasn’t looking to make this a shy rug!  But I was a little worried about showing all the design options to Brad, even though he was already signed on to the overall idea of FLOR tiles.  Usually when I go this far off the deep end (like proposing to paint our kitchen cabinets bright yellow) he is not impressed.  However, in this case he was on board!  His main desire was to have something that wasn’t too tight of a pattern, that would in a lot of ways look random.

To narrow it down, we each picked out our top three:

And unfortunately none of them were the same 🙁 However, once we realized that Brad’s 2nd favorite and my favorite where of the same pattern, just in different colors, a compromise was easy.  We just swapped the gray out for the lighter blue (or the dark blue out for black, depending on how you look at it) to arrive at one that was right in the middle.

From there, it only took a little more math (determining how many tiles would create the right length for the hallway) and a few design tweaks (to fit nicely in that length) to arrive at the final plan:

A little out there?  But I really love it.  I’d love to hear what you think but, spoiler alert, we did already get it set up in our hallway.  I’ll be back to share that process and show the final result on Wednesday!