Shelf Liner Turned Anti-Slip Rug Pad

What I love most about waking up in the morning is that there is a furry puppy smile to greet me. As soon as Charlie gets out of her crate (she’ll still be crate training until she’s a year old), she runs from the guest room into the primary bedroom, shaking her tail so hard that her whole body wiggles.

She also runs across the new rug in the upstairs hallway, but unfortunately does this to it:

Hmm. Well, I have to keep the dog. I want to keep the rug. But I don’t want to fix this each morning. What to do?

A rug pad keeps slippery rugs like mine held snugly to a smooth floor. Unfortunately, getting one can cost almost as much as the rug itself. For example, you can pick up these at Target, but the size I would need for a rug this size starts at $15, and for your usual 5×8 rug, can cost around $30. But if you hold one in your hand, it’s basically the same material that you can find to line your kitchen shelves and drawers. Suddenly, I had an idea. I had some leftover liner in the pantry and cut it to size.

Problem solved! Of course, it’s a bit anticlimactic to see that the rug looks the same as it did before I put the anti-slip pad down, but isn’t that sort of the point?

Granted, shelf liners are only 12 or 20 inches wide, so for bigger rugs you’d have to tape two strips together. In this case, the cost savings is minimal, and really not worthy of the effort. Instead, I would recommend STOPP anti-slip rug pads from IKEA. They are the cheapest I’ve found and come in two sizes ($3.99 – $9.99) and can easily be cut to size.