Epic Fail and What I Learned

Well, I have an Epic Fail to share with you.  What is an Epic Fail?  At the camp that I work at in the summer we have a really fun programs team.  We hire two college aged guys and one girl who are really fun and they plan all the fun programs and do all the funny skits. Our kids are ages 6-13 years old.  They did a video called “Epic Fail” and it explains all the potential “Epic Fails” at camp.

(p.s….at camp we are only allowed to wear shoes and socks around camp unless you are at a water activity that requires waders.  The shoe fail was because he was wearing Chaco’s on the street, clearly not a water activity.  The success was the kampers reaction to this phenomenon the programs team created called planking.  It is so silly, yet hilarious, and it caught on like wildfire.  Check it out here  Also, the blonde haired girl that you see in both videos is my friend Debbie whose wedding was this weekend)

In the DIY world ”Epic fail is going out on a limb to try something and not succeeding .  Here is a reality if you are a DIYer.  You will have Epic Fail’s.  You might lose a little money in the process, but hopefully it’s not on something major or costly.  My guess is  it’s probably not costly because you are DIYing.  Today I have a fail to share with you.  My laundry room rug.  If you remember this post you will see that we have a painted concrete floor in our laundry room:

I wanted a large rug that was durable, stain resistant, and dog friendly.  The room’s dimensions are 21 X 13 so finding a rug that specific dimension was very costly.  I am talking on the cheap end $300-400 dollars.  I am not okay with that because my dogs will just ruin it.  So I did some extensive research on painted rugs.  I thought about painting canvas, but I came across this blog post and thought that this might work the best.  She painted an outdoor rug.

Let me first give you a preview of the end of this post.  This IS a great idea.  I learned from it and was successful with it, but I did it wrong in my laundry room.  So, if you want to learn how to make a cheap rug keep reading.  Hopefully you will learn from my fail and see how I made it successful.

I searched online and bought this rug from Home Depot.  I actually bought three.  I had an online coupon so I spent $50.oo on three outdoor rugs.  These rugs are actually softer and have a fuzzy nap to them.  They are very thin.  They could be used outside, on a dock, in a mudroom, dining room, or anywhere really.

source here

I got it home and laid it out in my laundry room.  I had to cut one of them down to fit the room.

I taped it like a champ .  I wanted multiple stripes (shocker, I know).

I went and bought brown exterior paint.  I went back and forth between exterior spray paint and regular paint.  I had a feeling spray paint would work better but I really didn’t have a large place to spray paint this rug and I lazily didn’t want to tape off the entire room.  So, I bought a quart of exterior paint.

I started to roll on the paint and I realized that it was hard to get between the nap (this rug literally is filled with small little raised nubs)  The high nap roller was taking forever to paint the part of the rug between the nubs.  The spray paint would have covered the entire thing (nubs and between) easily.  The first stripe was completely painted in about an hour(nubs and around the nubs) and I was loosing paint fast.  I had about 20,000 stripes to go.  (okay, that is exaggerating but I had about 20.5 feet left to paint.)  I decided to brush the paint on the rug.  It took less paint, and less time.  Only the nubs were painted and I liked the way the “in between” was lighter, it made it look more weathered.  Here is the end product:

Sexy huh?  I was o

bsessed with it.  I loved it!  Then we lived on it.  This is the laundry room/mudroom with two dogs so it gets some serious traffic.

Here is how it held up.  This is right before we took it out of the room:

Not so sexy.  The good thing was the rug got even softer, the bad thing is that the paint faded tremendously.  Since the “in between” wasn’t painted it made it worse.  Then, my clutzy self spilled some juice.  The juice came out easily but the light layer of paint came out just as easy.   Bummer.  The good news is the one stripe that I labored on with a roller (getting in-between the naps) held up the way I wanted it to.  I only wish I would have put out the same effort for the rest of them.  This did gave me hope for future rugs.  It did lighten up a little but I spilled some juice on it to test its durability and it held up on cleaning just find.  I found myself wishing that I would have put the 2500 hours into making it work.

 Here is what I should have done:

• Painted the rug with exterior spray paint.  The prep would have been heck, but I would still be enjoying my rug today
• My major fail was  being ultra cheap.  It would have taken about 10 cans of spray paint or another quart of paint.  In the end I would have had a rug that lasted for about $120.  Rugs are expensive because they have to be durable.  There are inexpensive DIY options but you have to sometimes put a little money in to save a little.
• My second major fail was being lazy.  DIYing takes effort and time.  This is why some people don’t do it.  I should have put the effort into prepping for spray paint OR rolling well with paint I bought.

It’s not so bad:

• I wasted only 64 bucks of my garage sale money.  Of course I wish I could have it back but I don’t and I have learned from it.  I guess you always pay for your education.  Hopefully because of me, you won’t have to pay for yours.
• I had a 4 X 6 piece of rug that I had cut off the third rug to make it fit.  I wanted to try again so I used it for Asa’s room.

aaa

This time I did it right.  I bought two cans of high performance, exterior spray paint. One white and one grey.  I taped off simple stripes.  (I am addicted, I know)

I sprayed the three coats of the white and when it dried, I taped off the white stripes.  I then painted three coats of gray stripes.

All of the rug (nubs and in-between) was painted and it turned out like this:

Much better.  I walked on it a few days before I put it in the room.  I did this to make it a little softer and to check its durability.  It did really well!

I ended up finding a rugs for the laundry room that worked.  I found them at K-Mart.  I had checked there before but they were out of stock and I didn’t see it.  Double bummer.   I bought three 4X 6 for $20.00 a pop.  Of course, I wish I would have found these, but on the other hand I wouldn’t have learned my lesson.   You will see the new rugs in the Laundry Room Reveal coming soon.  In my world, $124.00 bucks is still way cheaper than $300 in my book.  To be honest, $124 is probably what it would’ve cost to do the rug right the first time.  The simple lesson to be learned:  Don’t Cut Corners.

Hope this helps!  Thanks for reading,

Jennifer

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