Open Concept Organizing: DIY Outdoor Rug

After almost three years living in our house, I'm motivated to do some much needed updating outdoors this year. Our flower beds need some more dirt and new mulch. Our deck needs some attention and an eventual replacement. And our porch is just a porch with big potential to be something greater. As the weather warms up, my motivation to work on these areas increases, and I'm here today to share an easy DIY project to bring some fun color into an outdoor space.

My main goal in updating the porch area is to add some color and some seating. We have a pretty vast front yard and it's nice to just sit outside in the mornings with a cup of coffee or in the evening with a glass of wine or one of my Mister's home-brewed beers. But it's really hard to sit without a seating area....

To bring that homey feeling outside, I plan to create an area with a couple chairs and a table - something simple but usable. I thought it'd be nice to ground the seating area with a rug. Easy enough right?

After dreaming up some ideas for the arrangement of the furniture and doing some measuring, I decided a runner style rug would work best. Little did I know, an outdoor runner is not that easy to find. And, when they are found, they are expensive. In this case - well, in most cases really - I define expensive as more than I want to pay.

I marched off to Lowe's to try and find a cheaper solution and stumbled into the outdoor carpeting department. Outdoor carpeting is cheap and it comes in many colors besides grass green. I was really looking for a deep gray or black because our shutters are black and I wanted the rug to tie in to them. Unfortunately, our local Lowe's was out of the carpet in these colors. A little bummed out, I headed towards the front door but on my way, I passed some outdoor utility rugs. They were about the right width, but a little shorter than I wanted. I laid two out side by side and it was perfect. I picked those up for just $6 and headed home for step 2.

Putting two black rugs down on the porch doesn't really add color does it? I decided to stencil some color onto the rugs to make them a bit more fun and interesting. I found a stencil at Hobby Lobby (they don't sell them at Lowe's, FYI). I had some paint left over from my dog food storage project that closely matches the color of our house and a color in the pillows I bought for the porch. So, on our first 80 degree day of the year, I sprawled out on the porch and stenciled some teal flowers onto my black utility rugs in a random pattern.

The paint I used is a latex paint. I've heard that latex enamel paints or acrylic paint that is either specifically for outdoor use or light fast work the best for an outdoor project. I'm curious to see how my stenciled flowers will hold up. The porch is covered but it still gets some water when it rains and a decent amount of sun in the later part of the day.

I taped my stencil in place as I went so it wouldn't move around and I used a 1" stencil brush to tap the paint onto the rug.

Once the paint is completely dry, they're ready to move into their new home. Now, I've just got to wrap up a couple other projects, and I'll share the big reveal with you soon.