Covering An Old Rug

This is a great idea if you need multiple rugs around the house and want them all to stick to a specific theme.

Covering an old rug.

You want the rug to bring life to the floor like in laura s adorable melbourne home shown above where she layered a graphic flat weave over beige carpet and a basic tiled hearth. The anchoring nails on tack strips run about 3 4 inch long which is far too short to penetrate the old carpet plus a pad if the carpet has one and drive into the subfloor. Area rugs are usually the best way to hide an ugly carpet. The only difference when the rug is going to be used over a carpet is to make sure that the color of the rug complements the color of the carpet.

Unlike wall to wall carpeting that s fixed in place you can simply lay an area rug over the existing floor covering. Needless to say the rug was plenty large enough to cover the ugly carpet. A neutral color with a cut wool pile and no heathering or interesting variation. I figured this would be about as close i was going to get to the 10 x 10 size.

But when the rug arrived it ended up being about 8 x 11. Forget about spending a couple hundred dollars for an area rug and just make it yourself from your old carpet. Choose something with a different texture and or fiber like jute sisal silk. And i found out that the rug does stretch a bit which is not a huge issue.

You may be laying down an area rug because you can t stand the color of the existing wall to wall carpet such as in a rental unit but trust us it will look much worse if you just throw down a rug. Turn that old carpet into an amazing new area rug with just a little work. By leaving a layer of carpet you make it that much harder to nail down the tack strips the long wooden strips around the perimeter with upward pointing spikes.