bottle cap floor mat

While attending college in Florida, I lived in a house with some friends.
I spent most of my time in the garage with my Jeep.
We had an old couch out there where Brian and I would drink beer.
I think I even made a coffee table out of our surplus microwaves.
Many a hot and humid sunny Florida afternoon was spent in the garage!
Ah, the post-graduation time of my life!

One day, I found an abandoned floor mat in a parking lot.
It is made of perforated high density rubber, the kind used in an auto shop.
I put it in front of the garage couch and fate took over from there.
We discovered the mat's perforated holes are perfectly plugged by bottle caps.
And with great haste we drank; much satisfaction came from filling the mat.

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Fast forward to today.

The shop mat still serves its purpose under our workbench in the apartment.
It keeps the cork-board floors from being marred if we drop something.
It also acts as a great catch-all for dirt, sawdust, and debris.

And that is a problem - the floors are never clean!

In a fit of weekend long spring cleaning, this proved to be the coup de grâce.
I popped each and every cap out of the mat, and put them back in.
Years ago in college, the caps went in randomly, as we drank.
It was exciting to formulate a color and quantity based design this time!

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It was actually more complicated than it looks!
And it took hours - I think we watched 2 movies while I did this.
The caps are "pressed-in" - meaning their serrated edges are seated well.
This is part of the reason so much dust and hair and dirt was trapped.
The sharp bottle cap edges attracted and held on to dirt and debris.
This is also the reason my fingers hurt typing this today.


I put the caps in 3 bags and juggled them to loosen their grip on dirt.
That actually helped!
I'm so inventive.
I also scrubbed the mat front and back a few times.
The difference is noticable in the sequence below.
There are two images of the empty mat - before and after scrubbing.

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