Tiles Vs Tiles - Round #1

For years, we've lived with all tile floors, everywhere! And since we live in a rental apartment, that is also a basement, we needed a flexible solution that wouldn't break the bank and could also move with us. Plus, we wanted something that would be easy to clean, because with two pets (Henry, the dog, and Patches, the cat) you find yourself, more often than you want, with a rag and a spray bottle of pet cleaner. All of this made me think that carpet tiles would be the perfect solution for our cold floors.

And I think that I almost instantly fell in love with FLOR's All Dolled Up in Teal! The sample I ordered only reinforced my love of this tile! The colours work with our bedroom's yellow walls (which you can see below in the last image) and what's not to love about teal and green! 

The only kicker about this carpet, is that it's $22 a tile! And I need more than a couple of them. 

I need 44+ tiles to make it around the furniture in our bedroom. I say 44+ because there are bound to be cutting errors and I want a little flexibility in placement. I could settle for 47. But even a little math tells me that 47 X $22 is more $$ than I want to spend on carpet. 

FLOR has lots of different styles at different price points, and though this is starting to sound like an ad for them, it's totally not, I'm just obsessed with their tiles. But back to the different options. I got thinking about using different colours, which could be cheaper mixed in with my fav. Using the FLORbuilder, I came up with a basic idea. 

But as you can see, those 32 tiles still cost $576.94. Well beyond what I want to spend! But there was still one more option for cost savings, the FLOR outlet, where good carpet goes to find it's forever home with those who only want to spend $6.99 a tile. The cost comparison looks like this. 

The only problem is that because the outlet is an outlet, things are constantly moving in and out. Meaning that to create a floor for less, I would need to watch the store, buy ones I like, possibly wait, then buy a couple more. Which, I can totally accept as a process, if it means nice carpet for cheap. 

Plus, I have a couple of remnant carpet tile samples from a previous job, I thought I could incorporate, since I will probably use them again to show colour and texture, they might as well be part of my flooring rather than collect dust in a pile (at least that's my logic right now). UPDATE: Make that almost 2 dozen sample tiles. I never would have guessed there were that many in that storage pile!

Though this is an amazing price, it's important to keep in mind that at the end of the day, I will only be the owner of 26 tiles, and the user of 21. Sorry Patches, those tile are about to get some use!