I Wanted Wall-to-Wall Carpeting, But the Price Was Outrageous — So I Tried This Instead

Don’t come at me, but I was raised with the design belief that wall-to-wall carpet was an absolute no-no. Hardwood floors with a rug covering just the primary usable space in a room? For me, that’s been the only acceptable design solution. So if you have, say, a bedroom with a queen bed, an 8×10 rug will likely do the trick. Furnishing a larger living room? Maybe you kick it up to a 9×12. The goal, though, was always to let the floor show through. So imagine my surprise when I started gravitating towards the idea of covering the majority of my floors with rugs. 

This stemmed from two needs. First, I moved into an old rowhouse with 130-year-old floors. They’re beautiful, but they’re on borrowed time. Rugs are a solution to protect the sanding and refinishing we did. Second, our rooms are impossibly narrow. Standard rugs don’t work, so we have to shop for custom cut sizes. This is what first made me want to cover even more of the floor. The appeal of a rug going around the entirety of a room seemed cozy, grown-up, and, dare I say, chic? I couldn’t wait to get a rug perfectly cut to the perimeter of both my living room and dining room to give me a warm, textured anchor for furniture. But they’re wildly expensive. I needed a workaround to get the custom look with a slightly-less-than-custom price tag, and I figured there had to be a way to fake it or DIY something pretty close.

My workaround was to get custom cut rugs, but rather than getting one continuous rug, I bought multiple custom cut rugs. Both my living room and dining room are now covered with a sturdy sisal, but it’s an 8×13 here, a 5×7 there, a 4×6 over there. I’ve placed together rugs in varying sizes to cover the floor in a way that feels cohesive, but I didn’t have to pay for one giant piece of material. That’s where so much of the expense comes in — you buy a huge run of rug material to fit parts of the room that are maybe, in my case, 18’ across at some points and 7’ across at others, only to have significant areas cut out of it and ultimately wasted. 

A patchwork approach is so much cheaper, and it still looks somewhat visually seamless with this carpeting hack. This is now my go-to hack anytime someone asks me how I found rugs to fit my odd-shaped, narrow house and how to make a space feel cozier and more connected. Go for a custom cut, but get as many rugs as you need to in order to piece together rectangles and avoid off-cuts that waste material. You’ll get all the stylistic benefits of the custom cut covering the entirety of a room, but without spending thousands upon thousands of dollars.