Every apartment needs an adorable doormat if you are a 20-something who really loves Instagram. I am insanely proud of how mine turned out, and all it took was butchering a DIY video and ruining two paint pens and also an entire evening.
I think that this is super cute and it shows my personality and no one else is going to have it because everyone else can probably afford a doormat. I was following the basic idea of this Lone Fox video about DIY Ikea Hacks. The premise is to get a plain, super super cheap doormat from Ikea and to just paint it. That was certainly the plan. But the nearest Ikea is about an hour away, and my car doesn’t have AC so that would be miserable. And I’m a millennial, so I sure as hell wasn’t willing to wait for shipping. In theory, Target has a similar plain coir doormat for less than ten dollars, and the internet said that it was in stock at the nearest Target.
The internet was wrong (but they can’t but anything on the internet that isn’t true?) and after waiting for the poor Target associate to dig in the back to no avail, I bought the next best thing. Ish. The forlorn mat at the bottom of the shelf, coated in a thick layer of dust. But it was coir and it was cheap and I was impatient. So, I bought it.
The steps to how I created it are as follows
1. Measure out the dimensions of the mat to figure out how tall and wide each letter should be. Attempt to make a formula. Realize that you are bad at math.
2. Eyeball it instead and trace it out on sheets of computer paper. Figure that this is good enough.
3. Place the sheets on the mat to see if they fit. If not, return to step #1, or take a beat and have another glass of wine. Surely that will make you better at math.
4. Once they fit, cut the letters out of the sheet, making a rough stencil for yourself.
5. Tape those sheets in place where you want the letters to land. Nobody cares what kind of tape; this is not permanent. Just make sure it sticks.
6. Take a paint pen and color to your heart’s content.
7. Realize it probably would have been better and faster if you had used paint like the tutorial had instructed.
8. Press on because you have already started and no one can stop you because you live alone!
9. Wait until the paint dries, then remove the stencils.
10. Quit while you’re ahead. Don’t try to fix any details because you will ruin everything.
I love this mat. It has personality and it’s not that ridiculous “Hello Goodbye” mat that every woman in her 20s owns. And I didn’t have to spend $60 to get a similar one from Etsy. Even with all the supplies, this was less than $20. Hell yeah.
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