Check out this custom rug from Flickr member Red Jet Whistle! Using Flor tiles, some creativity, and one extra-sharp utility knife, she created a playful and graphic area rug that looks downright fabulous. I love it. Have you created a custom rug of your own using modular carpet tiles in a unique way? Or, have you seen any other creative ways of using carpet tiles? Share in the comments!
Semi-related tangent: I got the newest Flor catalog in the mail this week. Best. Ever. All that color was killing me! Did you see that awesome kitchen/dining room or this fantastic living room?? I've got serious color envy. OK, the end. I just had to get that out.
I am still amazed that Flor seems to be the only carpet company that has figured out that floor tiles are for more than just commercial jobs. Haute stuff, one of their new lines shows the flexibility of carpet tiles. The positive/negative look comes from two different floor tiles that are cut and spliced together. With Haute stuff, Flor is nice enough to do the work for you, but the same idea could be applied to any of their tiles.
It's pretty much a known fact that I'm a total sucker for textiles. So when I saw these rugs from Swedish designer Lena Bergstom, my eyes widened and my heart did that little fluttering thing it does when I get super excited about something. And then I let out what might have been an audible squeal.
The Bjork Rugs have such a beautiful textural quality, the result of weaving cotton and wool fibers together. Aptly named (Bjork is Swedish for Birch), these rugs definitely call to mind those beautiful trees. The designer explains, "I've been inspired by the rough black and white trunk which has a strong graphical presence and a unique structure. The leather edging alludes to the inside of the bark."
While these rugs certainly aren't cheap, the quality and beauty far surpasses anything you might find at your local IKEA. Plus, hello, leather edging. That's just fancy.
Our front door of our house opens up to our kitchen and our white rubber floors. We quickly found out that we needed some sort of runner to keep the floors clean. We currently have some boring brown Flor tiles, but I'm loving these plastic carpets from Brita Sweden. Available in a cheerful Scandinavian array of colors and patterns, these may be just the thing to infuse a little life into our white kitchen. Best of all is the modest $138 price.
I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record about Gilt, but they just keep on having amazing deals. I just picked up two 3' x 5' Flokati rugs for $158. A little stitching and that will make one nice big rug for an amazing price! The rugs are hand woven 100% New Zealand wool. Approximate pile height 3 inches and contains 50 grams of wool per square inch for comfort and insulation. Available in 2.5'x8', 3'x5', 5'x7', 7'x9' and 8'x10'.
You need a personal invitation to sign up for Gilt. Get yours here!
The use of pixels in home decor and accessories has been a noticeable trend for a while now. Most of the items I've seen though have been super pricey, designer pieces. If you'd like to get in on this trend without spending a boatload of money, consider the Squared Silly Rug from Flor. This 3x5 rug is available in four different colorways and boasts a low price of $159.99. Buy multiples of this modular rug to cover larger areas. Made from nylon with 41% post industrial recycled content.
With the birth of our daughter two months ago, we needed to move our 2 year old out of the nursery and into his own "big boy room" downstairs. We decided to have a little fun with the room and had my good friend Tony paint a mural of "Where the Wild Things Are" on the wall. We finished it off by gluing down some Flor carpet tiles. The "video" is really a series of photographs, one taken every 30 seconds and played back at 24 photo's a second. A total of 6,357 photo's were taken, representing over 54 hours of work. A huge thank you goes out to Tony who did an amazing job. The video doesn't really do the mural justice. You can see some close up pictures of the mural on my flicker account.
Loving these unique wood tiles from Spanish company Kuups. Through a specialized process, Kuups has created a high-quality product that can withstand heavy use both indoors and out, wet or dry. Available in over 10 different woods (all sustainable and Pan European Forest Council certified) and 13 different styles, these tiles are a fresh, modern approach to flooring.
Over the weekend we were able to get the rest of the painting done, and install our white rubber flooring. We purchased our flooring from Big D flooring, the local Roppe distributer. While there is nothing really unusual about rubber flooring, they looked at me really weird when I asked for it in snow white. A quick call into Roppe confirmed that we were doing something a little out of the ordinary. They said that they had never done a floor tile in snow white before. While I have a hard time believing that, I do know that the floor turned out nice. Some of the seams turned out a little more visible than I had hoped for, but we haven't given it a good cleaning yet, so it may improve. The install went pretty good. It basically consisted of spreading down some glue with a notched trowel and then setting the tiles in place. To finish things off I rolled the whole floor with a 100 lb floor roller. The bad news is that I was too tight with my measuring, and we ended up 3 tiles short. Luckily all the tile under the cabinetry is in place, so it won't hold us up at all.
Rubber flooring available from your local Roppe dealer for $6 a square foot plus install.
The kid approves.
We've been watching the classifieds for a while now to see if we could get any good deals on some of our kitchen appliances. We finally had some good luck the other day when we stumbled across this Siemens Avant Garde hood for only $450. It's 36" wide and normal prices are well above $1,000, so we feel like we got a pretty sweet deal. I actually really like the minimalist shape of it too.
We have drywallers coming in tonight to patch up the whole kitchen, hopefully they will be done by this weekend. We will probably start painting and putting in our Roppe rubber flooring sometime next week. Things are finally starting to come together.
One of the last things on the list is to order our countertops. We decided to go with laboratory counters from Trespa. At a quoted price of $15 a square plus fabrication, you just can't beat the price.
Sometimes the hardest part about doing a big remodel is being able to visualize what it is actually going to look like when it's done. Luckily for Ryan, he happens to be a pro at photoshop, so he was able to whip up a digital version of his kitchen before the hammers ever started swinging.
Our blog is full of pretty extensive info. We had no idea what we're doing. I'm an artist, love modern design and know Photoshop...and that's how we pretty much figured it out. We really shopped around for deals on cabinets, faucets, drawer pulls, tile and flooring. Even if a reader of your blog didn't want to do EVERYthing we did, I think they could find bits and pieces of what we did quite helpful.
Our project extended a bit outside of the kitchen (entry door, stairs, etc) which added to the cost. But we completely gutted it and did every piece brand new.
I've been lazy about posting good finished pics of the kitchen. If you guys dig it, let me know and I'll make sure to get them up. You can see everything on our site though in much more detail.
Those of you that have been following me on Twitter know that last Friday I started on my own kitchen project. We got the entire old kitchen demoed out, as well as the room underneath it (scope creep). We put down new subfloor to get rid of all the squeaks, and got a good start on the plumbing. Today we are ordering our flooring, white rubber tiles, and looking at countertops. I hope to finish up the plumbing and start on the electrical.
Check out my tweets to see how I'm doing!
This may be the smallest entry so far, but it packs plenty of punch. Ayan has made good use of the small floorplan in his Brooklyn Co-op.
My wife and I bought a co-op in Brooklyn earlier this year. The kitchen looked like it was all original from the late 50's, and in pretty rough shape. We gutted everything, including knocking down 2 partition walls, doing a pass through into the living room, and stripping lots of wallpaper. The cabinets are Ikea, counter tops are granite from a local shop, back splash is glass tile, and floor is cork, which we laid right over the existing linoleum. The appliances are all new GE.
Approx price, $6,000 for materials, $5,000 for appliances.
Keep reading for more pictures including a before shot that puts it all in perspective.
Ikea must be trying to do their part at easing the pain of the recent economic downfall because it seems that they have had an unprecedented number of great sales lately. This one may beat them all however. From this Saturday through Monday the 13th they are having another "Seize the Days" sale with some big savings. TUNDRA flooring is $0.49 a sq ft, the NORDEN dining table is $199 and Ikea 365 cookware is super cheap too. That's over 50% off on some things. Plus did I mention free breakfast again on Saturday morning?
If you remember a while ago we got a new Avalisa 5 x 8 rug for our living room. We had originally wanted the bigger 8 x 10 size, but had settled for the smaller one. After much deliberation we finally realized that the scale of the smaller rug didn't quite fit the room. We were able to work things out with Avalisa and our new rug arrived just a few days ago. We were relieved to see that the scale really does work much better for the room. While the $1360 price tag can be hard to swallow I just keep reminding myself it's only $16 a square foot :) Our bare floors do look much better now that they have a large rug, and the quality is such that I'm sure it will be around for quite some time.Rugs available from Avalisa from $310 - $1360.
I have some good friends who have recently purchased a wonderful old Mid Century Modern home in Salt Lake City, and they are in the middle of updating the interior. While looking at kitchen appliances online at Jenn-Air they found this picture entitled "Scandanavian Oasis" and completely fell in love with all the white. The cabinets and appliances will be easy to reproduce (Ikea and Jenn-Air) but the white flooring has got them (and me) stumped.
So how do you get white flooring like the one in this picture?
It's amazing how much some paint, flooring an furniture can change a space. Much like our old home, we painted everything bright white (we used Behr pure white eggshell enamel). The white paint, along with getting rid of all the baseboard make the room look so much cleaner. It's great to finally get our furniture in the house, now we can start to get some of our artwork up and make it look like a home.
The fact that it's done is probably the best thing about it. We pretty much knew from the beginning that the floor was pretty beat up. There were a lot of stains that I hoped we would be able to sand out, but in the end they were all full depth and not going anywhere. I ended up going pretty slow with the drum sander to try and get through all the old layers, and since I'm not a pro we have a little of the washboard effect. If I were to do it again, I may try an orbital instead of the drum sander.Even though it's not perfect, we still like it though. It's way better than what we had before and of course you get what you pay for. We spent around $0.90 a square foot, most of which was in the finish. Our stain was a Minwax oil based, natural color. I really like all the color variation we got from the different shades of boards. I'm not usually an oak fan, but I actually like it. We then used a water based polyurethane from Glitsa that was expensive but very easy to work with. We'll see how well it holds up. I wouldn't hesitate may to do it again on a floor that was in real rough shape like ours, but if I had a real nice floor to begin with, I might think harder about just calling a professional.
Cost for 800 square feet; $600 for repair boards, stain, polyurethane and applicator pads. $140 for sander rental and sandpaper.
It took me about 14 hours of sanding and about 4 hours to apply the stain and polyurethane.
More pics below.
I'm off to Diamond Rental to pick up a floor sander this morning. I've never actually refinished any floors before, but I have talked to plenty of people that have so I figure it can't be too hard. I hope to get them all sanded today and get our natural oil stain on. Tomorrow I will be putting on the protective finish.
If everything goes as planned I will be posting on Monday about our newly refinished hardwood floors.
Wish me luck!
Flor has been expanding their collection of carpet squares in leaps and bounds lately. I noticed that they now have a Martha Stewart line, as well as a Disney line. While neither of those two sound too appealing to me, the idea of an Alexander Girard line does. Although Alexander Girard has and extensive range of iconic patterns, it seems like they are focusing on his famous suns from the La Fonda Del Sol restaurant. These brightly colored sun faces with their bold patterns may be a little much for most rooms in my home, but they may fit in perfectly in a nursery. What do you think, would you be interested?
If your are interested, you can sign up now for a special introductory offer and more details at Flor's website.
Check out this custom rug from Flickr member Red Jet Whistle! Using Flor tiles, some creativity, and one extra-sharp utility knife, she created a playful and graphic area rug that looks downright fabulous. I love it. Have you created a custom rug of your own using modular carpet tiles in a unique way? Or, have you seen any other creative ways of using carpet tiles? Share in the comments!
I am still amazed that Flor seems to be the only carpet company that has figured out that floor tiles are for more than just commercial jobs. 
It's pretty much a known fact that I'm a total sucker for textiles. So when I saw these rugs from Swedish designer Lena Bergstom, my eyes widened and my heart did that little fluttering thing it does when I get super excited about something. And then I let out what might have been an audible squeal.
Our front door of our house opens up to our kitchen and our 
I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record about 
The use of pixels in home decor and accessories has been a noticeable trend for a while now. Most of the items I've seen though have been super pricey, designer pieces. If you'd like to get in on this trend without spending a boatload of money, consider the 
Over the weekend we were able to get the rest of the painting done, and install our white rubber flooring. We purchased our flooring from 
The kid approves. 
We've been watching the classifieds for a while now to see if we could get any good deals on some of our kitchen appliances. We finally had some good luck the other day when we stumbled across this 
Sometimes the hardest part about doing a big remodel is being able to visualize what it is actually going to look like when it's done. Luckily for Ryan, he happens to be a pro at photoshop, so he was able to whip up a digital version of his kitchen before the hammers ever started swinging.
Before
photoshop design
During
After
Those of you that have been following me on 
This may be the smallest entry so far, but it packs plenty of punch. Ayan has made good use of the small floorplan in his Brooklyn Co-op.
Ikea must be trying to do their part at easing the pain of the recent economic downfall because it seems that they have had an unprecedented number of great sales lately. This one may beat them all however. From this Saturday through Monday the 13th they are having another "Seize the Days" sale with some big savings. 
If you remember a while ago we got a 
I have some good friends who have recently purchased a wonderful old Mid Century Modern home in Salt Lake City, and they are in the middle of updating the interior. While looking at kitchen appliances online at Jenn-Air they found this picture entitled "
