Covering An Old Rug

Tack strips are difficult to install.

Covering an old rug. 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. 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. Add an area rug. And i found out that the rug does stretch a bit which is not a huge issue.

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. 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. A neutral color with a cut wool pile and no heathering or interesting variation. 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.

But when the rug arrived it ended up being about 8 x 11. I figured this would be about as close i was going to get to the 10 x 10 size. Forget about spending a couple hundred dollars for an area rug and just make it yourself from your old carpet. In most cases wall to wall carpeting is very basic.

Choose something with a different texture and or fiber like jute sisal silk. Needless to say the rug was plenty large enough to cover the ugly carpet. Turn that old carpet into an amazing new area rug with just a little work.