Fitted/sunken front door mat

iamcornholio

SailorSam wrote: »

Wouldn't there be a 'damp proof membrane' in the floor, and if you tried to cut a sort of well for the mat, wouldn't you damage the membrane ??????

No, any membrane will be under the concrete slab and you would not go that deep

Paul_the_Painter

Complete rubbish about having to break up the screed for a matwell, unless you have cheap thin feltback carpet stuck down to the floor there is plenty of thickness to work with.

Underlay is around 6-12mm thick, carpet is around 6-20mm thick, coir matting starts at around 15mm thick.

http://www.homeseasons.co.uk/cgi-bin/sitewise.pl?act=det&p=391

http://www.tradepriced.co.uk/coir_matting.html

Then you need "square edge" - last item on page silver or brass effect

http://www.tradepriced.co.uk/carpet_metals.html

When I was selling carpet we worked on £25.00 for fitting matwell, £25 for the coir, and £25 for the metal.

Not the cheapest you could get, but not bad.

You should think carefully about where you want it, I used to suggest that if it was possible to fit the coir matting across the whole width of the hallway. This was for a couple of reasons; the first being that it is simply more practical, giving more mat and less carpet, the second was that some of our fitters were less carefull than others! Quite frankly running one straight piece of square edge would be fine, but asking them to get 4 mitre cuts looking acceptable to me was a bit more tricky.

Get bigger than you think you need, to get an idea, open your front door - walk in - close the door behind you. Now look at where you are standing, you want the matwell to be at least that big. Many people have them installed and they look wonderful, but they can't get in the door and close it behind them, so they end up putting another mat after the matwell. This looks a bit messy compared to a properly sized one.

If your front door opens into a longish hallway, I would go about 1m20 from the front door with the coir for the full width of the hallway.

richardw

I've seen washable door mats in John Lewis.

ic

I have a terrace house with an internal porch. Within the porch I fitted coir matting (approx 1m square).

If you don't have a porch to do this, but assuming you have a hallway, could you instead just chop off a metre or so closest to the front door of the carpet and fit the coir matting wall to wall? Wickes sell a mat that is 80cm x 150cm for £25, and Carpet Right sell coir matting off a 1m roll for £30 per metre (other suppliers are available online, but typically the postage charges cancel out any savings). Join the coir matting and the carpet using a long screw down edge, available from all good DIY sheds. Ideally the matting should be glued down with spray adhesive or double sided carpet tape, to stop it moving around when people wipe their feet.

If the coir matting is fitted wall to wall, then it provides an ideal place to leave wet shoes to dry to the sides of the hall. Its also much easier to fit than cutting squares in the carpet and sinking holes.

genny

Any decent quality carpet/flooring fitter will be able to do this for you with no problem.

Hintza

This is our plan in the new build. Good tip about going further back into the hallway.