Friday, July 6, 2012

New Rug for my Rugrats

I have many moments where I find myself coming up for air after a particularly long Pinterest session. So to make the ridiculous amounts of hours I spend on Pinterest feel a little more legitimate, I vowed to complete at least one Pinterst project a week or...GASP...lose my time sucking Pinterest privileges.

So here is the first of many weekly PINspiration posts!

As mentioned before, the town I live in has a Walmart and not much else. So when my dog befouled our living room rug, I didn't have a lot of options for replacements.

To be perfectly honest, I was thrilled about the pup's accident. I hated that rug.

Kirby on the old ugly rug. The accident totally wasn't his fault, by the way. He's a good boy. :)

So my PINspiration for this project were the following:


this...
Source: curbly.com via Jayme on Pinterest


and this...


I love the look of nautical blue stripes to add some color and fun to my living room and I was tired of dog hair embedding itself into the thick wooly piling of the old rug.

Luckily, cheap ugly 6x9 thin carpet remnant rugs were selling at Walmart for $39.99. I purchased the rug, as well as a roll of painters tape, and a gallon of ColourPlace Semi-Gloss Interior paint in this beautiful shade of blue that I don't know the name of (this is my first tutorial, please cut me some slack :/ ). The lady at Walmart who mixed it for me was pretty perplexed that I would purposely ruin a new rug with paint.

"I guess it's bold of you?" she said, unconvincingly.

Clearly she hasn't been wasting weeks collecting rug painting tutorials on Pinterest, as I have.

I taped out the stripes I wanted and used a brush to paint on my thick stripes. The roller wasn't able to spread the paint as well on the textured surface. Painting was hard work because the rug absorbs the paint so fast. It took almost the entire gallon to paint four one foot wide stripes on my rug.

It is helpful to buy a rug that is a color you already like. That way you just have to add your design to it, instead of covering it up in its entirety. You could paint it two colors like the rug from The House of Smiths blog, but I imagine that it would take forever on a 9 x 6 sized rug. (You should check out her tutorial! It was lovely.)

I gave my stripes two coats. It took three long days to dry. I probably checked if it was dry hourly because I was so excited to get it in the house.

Here she is...



Now, Kirby and baby Ellie have a prettier, easier to clean rug to roll around on!

The blue looks great against Kirby's gold fur, and Ellie's primary colored toys scattered all over the place. I smile every time I look at the floor.

The paint doesn't feel sticky on your feet, and the entire project was so easy I'm considering doing another one for our office/library.

I'll post better pictures in the future of the whole room so you can see the cheery effect it has everything.

Now, I have to figure out what to do with the old crappy rug.

Anyone else out there thrilled with the result of their rug painting experience? Does anyone have advice for painting a rug with a stencil (which I think will be the next rug painting adventure)? I'd love to hear about it!

P.S. You can follow me on Pinterest if you'd like. I have a whole board dedicated to rugs because I'm cool like that.

P.S.2: I'm linked up at The 36th Avenue Party.


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