Most homeowners want to buy Flooring made from traditional materials like hardwood and tile. Other people, however, prefer a more creative approach. They’ll try just about anything to make their floors look unique. If you’re willing to invest a lot of time in your floors, then you might consider one of these outlandish flooring ideas that actually worked.

Recycled Leather Belt Floor

Recycling helps keep the environment healthy by keeping trash out of landfills. Most people think that recycling is important, but how far are they really willing to go? One London-based designer has taken recycling to a new level by using old leather belts as flooring material.

The floors look surprisingly attractive, but that’s largely because the designer selects every belt by hand. The painstaking process can mix and match colors to create an unusual, yet beautiful, aesthetic for homes and businesses.

If you want to try a similar project, you’ll need to find hundreds of used leather belts. Good luck with that.

Pennies Make an Inexpensive Flooring Material

In the 1800s, Pennies were made of copper and nickel. Today, pennies are almost entirely zinc. Choosing zinc helps the United States government save money, although pennies still cost more to produce than they’re worth.

That’s a problem for the US Mint to figure out. For consumers, pennies offer an extremely cheap way to make gorgeous floors. It takes less than $2 per square foot to decorate your floor with pennies.

Making a floor out of pennies takes a lot of time, though. A business owner in London spent three months decorating his floor with similarly sized coins. If that sounds outrageous, then you haven’t thought about all of the work involved.

How much time and effort would it take you just to gather enough pennies to cover your floor? Then, you have to position all of the pennies perfectly and cover them in a protective glaze without moving the coins. Penny floors look cool, but it’s easier to buy flooring from a store.

Puzzle Piece Floors Add a Creative Twist

Many of today’s flooring systems snap together easily. When a New Brunswick furniture maker noticed this trend, he decided to take a creative approach. Instead of making straight boards that snap together, he created puzzle pieces that add a new decorative twist to floors.

The puzzle floors haven’t become a focus for the family-owned business, but they have provided a new revenue stream that keeps everyone afloat when demand for handmade furniture is low.

People around the world have developed fun ways to decorate their homes. Would you ever try one of these three ideas, or would you stick to the products that you can have professionally installed by a local flooring store.