Dress up a faux plank floor with a faux rug

A little while ago I wrote about how to coax a homely plywood sub-floor into looking like well-aged painted planks, all for less than $100. Reader enthusiasm raged. I've had lots of feedback from readers who had fun trying this at home. Here's one of my faves:

Dear Mag,
     I read your column about redoing a plywood floor to look like an old plank farmhouse floor. Let me say I was very sceptical but my wife really wanted this look and we could not afford a new wood plank floor.
     We peeled up the carpeting, removed the foam underlay, pounded down hundreds of staples and screwed down a layer of 1/4-inch plywood. Next we applied floor leveller and it worked like a charm. It eliminated the grain of the plywood and added the texture of a well-worn and scuffed floor. We applied one coat of Porch and Floor paint. Then, using a router with a "V" bit, we cut the plank lines into the plywood at random widths with cross cuts for the board ends. A Dremel tool with a stone bit added the various imperfections needed to convince people that it was truly an older plank floor. I then added two more coats of Porch and Floor paint and sat back to fool the Christmas guests with our new "Faux Floor". It worked even better than expected. The guests thought that this was the floor that was revealed after removing the carpet.
Gary
Flesherton, ON

Friend or Faux

Of course Gary out-fauxed me by employing a router to carve distinctive v-grooves between his 'boards'. I salute you Gary, and answer your challenge by adding a painted-on rug to top off my planks. I believe the correct terminology for this optical illusion is trompe l'oeil, which is French for "faux". (Faux actually used to be a French word, but was annexed by the English language in the late nineties during the proliferation of American home décor shows.)

Mo' Faux

The faux carpet effect is fun to do and takes a couple of afternoons. I used a sort of neo-Persian, semi-Celtic, Dr. Seuss-ish design that sprung unbidden from my twisted mind. (You can use stencils if you actually want your rug to look good.)

Materials

• Blue masking tape
• Spackle
• Lots of shades of decorator's acrylics, which are available in small, inexpensive bottles
• Water-based urethane

Tools

• Measuring tape
• Rags
• Stencils (optional)
• Paint brush
• Artist's palette knife
• Artist's brushes

Steps

1. Sketch your design first on paper. WARNING: You will probably not fully appreciate the importance of this step until you're on your hands and knees painting over your first attempt following a misguided crack at 'winging' it. I learned this in the manner I learn most things: the hard way.
2. Measure and mark the outline of your rug on the floor using blue masking tape, or just free-hand it with a pencil if you're in a hot-dogging mood.
3. Paint the body of your rug on the floor using a base coat of the rug's main colour. Let it dry.
4. If you're painting over faux planks, apply spackle to the plank lines that fall within the rug's perimeter or the finished rug will not fool the eye, or even fool the you. An artist's knife works well for feathering spackle into the delicate lines, whereas a big honking putty knife will be irritating to work with.
5. To get a soft, fibrous, carpet-like effect, mix spackle with a slightly darker shade of the base colour (ratio is about 50% spackle, 50% paint). Adding the spackle will take all the gloss out of the paint by giving it just enough texture to create millions of mini-shadows. Dab the mixture evenly over the base colour with a big brush. This will give your rug a very matte, tufty-looking surface.
6. Once the surface is dry, use a measuring tape and pencil to sketch out the basic design of your rug.
7. Start painting the design in, using a fine, tough-bristled brush to dab the paint rather than stroke it on. This will give you an effect that looks more like fibre than paint. If your paint is really glossy, add a little spackle to tone it down.
8. Detail is critical. If you look at real Persian rugs or Celtic designs, you'll see that they're just drenched with insane detail. Add lots of tones and shades and build the three-dimensional quality of the rug bit by bit. If you're not graphically inclined, simple "S" shapes and "C" shapes piled together can give you some great curlicue effects.
9. Add tassels at each end of the rug. Tassels are the key element that 'sells' the rug as being a three-dimensional object. Paint the tassels in a raggedy, helter-skelter way, and then add shadows that coordinate with the main light source in the room.
10. Coat the whole surface with several coats of clear, satin-finish water-based urethane.

Invite friends over to see your luminous work of art. When people exclaim, "You faux, girl!", treat them to a winsome blush. But no matter how many accolades you receive from friends, there's no greater compliment to your faux skills than your cat sitting right in the middle of the rug, looking puzzled.