$20 rug all taped up

This beautiful rug for under $30

So when we started out decorating our place we saw this beautiful rug at Hobby Lobby. It was black and white chevron, and absolutely perfect. Except it cost $50 when it was 50% off. Well that's just not a good enough deal for us. So we decided to come up with a way to do it ourselves for less. Shortly after the forever amazing Pinterest offered us an answer, painting a rug.Step one in this plan was finding a cheap rug. Not only did we want it to be cheap to satisfy our thrifty side but also just in case it didn't work out. This may be the first project where I had my doubts. We found a large, 5x7 black rug at Family Dollar for $20. Usually I'm not a huge supported of the "fake dollar stores" as mentioned in our earlier postBut in this case they really came through for us. While creating the chevron pattern, it was crucial to keep it the same size, slope, and everything lines up. Even the slightest offset would be extremely noticeable with our drastic color difference. In order to accomplish this we cut out a stencil in cardboard. The stencil was the same distance wide as the rug, five feet. We would tape out the bottom side of the stencil, slide it so that tape line was even with the top of the stencil, then tape the next row from the bottom of the stencil. Every other of these taped off sections would be painted white. Since both sides of the tape would not be seeing paint, we only had to exact-o knife one side of each piece of tape. We couldn't have any little overlap messing up the straight line of where the white paint would go. The inspiration pin directed us to use fabric spray paint. After two seconds of using this we realized that was so not going to work, The fabric paint came out in an a very tight stream. This made it impossible to keep the shading consistent and meant we would have to use about 200 cans of this $10 paint. Definitely not our style. Winging it our next idea was to sponge on regular wall paint. We tried to make this work and put a lot of effort into making this method work, then realized it was not. It would have taken forever and the sponges were not up to the task. We were finding little yellow sponge pieces painted into our rug. So still winging it we came up with plan number three and bought the cheapest white spray paint money can buy, a dollar a can at Walmart. However, before executing this method another step had to be taken.We laid out and folded multiple plastic bags over top of the sections that were not going to be painted. Then taped the bags down over the exact same tape line as previously laid out. Oh and by "we" I mean our Personal Contractors. Let me explain, by this point we were getting pretty annoyed with our rug and our methods not working, the Personal Contractors had more patience and were more precise than we could have been at this point. From here we just laid the cheap spray paint on thick. We did two coats that each took three cans of paint. We realized that we reached a point where we just couldn't get it any whiter. With this method we can paint or dye the entire piling of the rug, just the top surface. Therefore there will always be a little black visible in our painted sections. This worked out ok though because it was consistent. I know what you're thinking and yes its a little rougher of rug. Its obviously not soft and fluffy, but its also not as bad as you would assume. The rug was stiff to begin with so at this price we are willing to live with a little rough.All in all this rug cost under thirty dollars. Beat that Hobby Lobby! The rug itself was $20 and we spent $6 on spray paint and about $3 on painters tape. I'm choosing to not count the methods that didn't work because you guys won't make those same mistakes :)