Review Week: FLOR Toy Poodle Carpet Tiles

I absolutely hate wall-to-wall carpeting. It gets dirty easily, is hard to clean effectively and is expensive to replace. And yet, I have had carpet in every home I’ve ever lived in except for my childhood home in the Virgin Islands. Clearly, it is the preferred choice of home builders because it is cost-effective, but it is not a healthy floor covering at all, no matter what it’s made of. That said, I do love rugs, because they can be picked up, deep cleaned and although they are not disposable, they can be replaced easily if need be. This is just one of the reasons I’ve always been impressed by FLOR, a company that makes beautiful carpet tiles in a wide variety of styles and colors. I recently had an opportunity to review a rug of my choosing from FLOR’s product line, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

I loved the idea of carpet tiles for several reasons. You are able to make a rug as large or small as you’d like, and if you so choose, you could even do wall to wall carpeting with them. Also, if one tile is stained or dirty, you can pick up that one tile and have it cleaned or replaced if need be. But why I love FLOR is that a lot of their tiles are made of recycled materials. The company also has a tile recycling program. You can send tiles back to FLOR at the end of their life cycle for proper recycling.

When I received the tiles, I was really excited! I selected a rug made up of 20 Toy Poodle tiles in Fluffy Fuschia and Fifi Orange to match the newly painted color scheme in my daughter’s room. Each tile is 19.7″ x 19.7″. Even knowing that, I was still a little surprised at how large they are. The 20 tiles were split between two boxes, but each box was pretty heavy.

When I sat down to put the rug together, I realized I had a problem. It would be much easier to put the rug together with the furniture taken out of the room. Otherwise, it was going to be pretty tough to get under the bed to attach tiles at the corners. My husband helped me push the furniture into the corners and against the wall so I’d have a decent work space, but it was still pretty tight in a small room. So my first observation is that laying carpet tiles down would be much easier in an empty room than in one that is filled with furniture, particularly if you plan on putting the furniture on top of the rug.

I pulled out the tiles and started attaching the corners together with the FLOR Dots, adhesive backed strips that were included with the rugs. But I became really indecisive about how I wanted to lay out the tiles. Before I ordered, I had created a design using FLOR’s rug design tool, but I couldn’t remember what it looked like. So I wound up going back to the computer to try to recreate the design I had originally built. What this made me realize it how versatile the tiles are. I literally went through at least 10 different designs with the tile colors I had received before settling on one.

I went back to the room with a new design in mind about 30 minutes later. I had to move some of the tiles I had already placed to create the new design I had decided on. That turned out to be really easy. The dots are designed to be easily moved when you first attach them to the tiles. Then with use of the rug, the adhesive seals and becomes more secure over time. They can still be disassembled, but the tiles are not supposed to shift with use. What I didn’t realize however, is that FLOR tiles are not designed to be used on top of carpet. I put together the entire rug, then got frustrated because the tiles kept shifting and moving and the seams were coming apart.

I went back to the FLOR site and read that the tiles should be used only on bare floor. I really wished I had read that before putting the rug together, but I was happy to have an explanation about why the tiles weren’t staying put. There is literally no room in the house without carpet, so I couldn’t test it on bare floors to see if they would hold better. I definitely believe that they would.

I loved the versatility of the tiles and the ability to easily change the design of the rug, and I loved the fact that the tiles felt durable and were easy to work with. So although my initial impression was great, I can’t completely evaluate them because I don’t have a bare floor on which to put them. I will definitely try again when I have a bare floor. Because so many homes have wall-to-wall carpet, I think it would be in FLOR’s best interest to put a note on each product page that says their tiles should not be used on top of existing carpet. This would prevent other customers from overlooking that like I did.