DIY Car Floor Mats: Save Money With This Easy Project

Floor mats are an important part of your car's cabin composition. They serve as a barrier between your car's sensitive floor upholstery and a veritable galaxy of dirt, mud, and sand from the beach or anywhere else. Not to mention the other things that fleck off your passengers' boots, shoes, sandals, or even bare feet. Unfortunately, floor mats, built tough though they may be, don't last forever. Fabric car mats get stains and eventually wear out, and rubber mats start smelling funny. You can get replacement mats from your local automotive store, but a good set of resistant mats can run you $100 or more.

If you're in a particularly rugged line of work or regularly cart around messy passengers, you can't constantly drop 100 bucks on floor mat replacements. Instead of all that cash, you can save a lot of money by making floor mats for your car from scratch with simple, cheap materials. They might not last as long, but replacing these homemade mats is much cheaper than buying regular ones.

Do you know how home and hardware stores often sell custom-sized carpets? The custom sizing is accomplished by taking a fully-sized carpet and cutting it down to customer specifications. This process leaves a lot of scraps, and those stores are always looking to get rid of their excess scrap inventory. Thus, the savings are passed onto you.

If you visit your local hardware store like Home Depot, you can purchase a stack of carpet scraps for around $2 a square. If you're lucky, they'll already be big enough to comfortably fit the footwells in your car, but if they're too small, you can stick a few of them together with some glue or heavy-duty staples to make a patchwork mat. The carpet scraps are safe to use in all of your car's footwells, though if you're using them in the driver's seat, make sure you stick some grip pads to the bottom so they don't slide around and get under your pedals.

Since these patchwork mats are made of regular carpet, you can clean gunk out of them the same way you'd clean your carpet at home, with a little bit of scrubbing and a DIY cleaning solution. If they become too gunked up for you to keep using, you can just chuck them in the garbage and buy a fresh stack of scraps for the same low cost.