Kid-Friendly Style with FLOR Carpet Tiles

Note: We received FLOR carpet tiles to facilitate our review. We were not compensated monetarily. All opinions in this post are honest and are my own.

Since getting married, Brian and I have always enjoyed decorating the space in which we live. We share a modern aesthetic, which has made the process pretty fun for us. When our kids came along, we were still able to keep the style we like by picking furniture with clean, straight lines.

Of course, as we all know, kids do make it harder to keep things clean. We’ve had to be particular in the fabric we picked for our couch, for instance, because we knew spills would inevitably grace its surface. And at our old house, the beige carpet was SO hard to keep clean! It was constantly spotted from some spill or another, but it would’ve been too expensive to recarpet the whole house, so we just cleaned it as best we could.

We were really thankful to find a new house with tile in the main living areas, though, and we’ve been in the new house about a month. There are a few downsides to tile, though. It’s a hard surface, for one thing. And kids fall down a lot. Especially babies learning to walk… and little boys who love to wrestle. So, yeah, tile has the potential for disaster. Another negative to tile is that it can make the house seem… echo-y, for lack of a better word. Moving in couches and chairs and other soft surfaces helps with this, but we knew what the real solution to both of our tile-related problems would be – a rug.

We knew we wanted a rug around the couch, so that our feet could have a cozy spot to land, and so that if kids roll off the couch, they come in contact with something soft. It would also really ground the sofa in the room, and add a little color (which we love!) to the decor. Of course, rugs can come with a lot of the same problems as carpet. They’re big, they’re expensive, and if you spill something on one you really just have to deal with it unless you want to buy a whole new rug. We also, in our searching, had a hard time finding a rug that was the color scheme we wanted for our space – blues and greens, and certain shades of these blues and greens, at that.

Enter FLOR – the perfect solution. If you haven’t heard of them before, they’re a system of carpet tiles that you (easily) assemble with adhesive dots to create a rug (or even wall-to-wall carpeting) of any size. Each tile is 19.7″ square, so a grid of 12 squares makes about a 5’x7′ rug. I looked at all the different styles – there are a LOT – and decided that the slightly shaggy Rake Me Over style was perfect for us. There were tons of colors to pick from, too, which made me happy. I knew I wanted blues and greens, but wasn’t sure about the layout. FLOR makes it really easy with a customization tool that lets you play with your layout sooooo easily. I had a lot of fun with it!

 

Once I figured out the layout, it generated the list of which squares we needed. I saved my design to my account, which made it really easy for laying out the tiles when they arrived. They came in two boxes, neatly stacked inside:

 

And we also got adhesive dots, and instructions (which you really don’t even need – it’s very intuitive to put the rug together):

 

You can see in the next photo how large the dots are – and they’ve got lines to make it really easy to put them exactly where they need to go:

 

 

You can also see all our squares ready to be laid out:

 

 

Here’s a side view of one of the tiles – love the shaggy texture!

I referred to my design and it took mere minutes to lay it out on the floor.

 

Then, all I did was lift up each corner where two or more squares met and install a dot:

 

 

 

So, so, so easy to do, and voila! A beautiful rug that compliments our living room perfectly.

 

Of course, beyond the ease of installation and the customization options, FLOR tiles are SO kid-friendly! Let’s say our 4-year-old spills his red juice on one of the tiles and stains it. Rather than having to replace a whole rug, we’d just need to pop up one square and spend less than $20 to have our rug looking like new again. And I say they’re kid-friendly… but really they’re Christi-friendly, too. We had some FLOR tiles in the dining area of our old house, and I spilled HOT PINK craft paint all over one tile. It was so nice to just replace the tile and not have to spend a lot of money to make it look good again.

FLOR has more than just solid-colored tiles, though. They have patterns galore, and you could really have a field day with different designs. As for us, we’re loving our rug! Be sure and check out flor.com, and play around with the customization tool to make a rug that’s perfect for your space.