24x36 Door Mat

Measure the gap, not the doorway

A door that swings inward has a fixed clearance under its leading edge, usually somewhere between a quarter of an inch and three quarters of an inch once the floor is finished. A felt mat on a rubber base sits low, but low is not the same as zero. If the mat is the thicker of the two, the door rides up onto it and shoves it forward a little on every swing until the mat is out of place and the door starts to drag. None of that is visible when you stand in the doorway and look at it. It only appears after the mat is down.

• Close the door and slide a ruler under it. Take the reading at the latch side, which is where the gap is usually smallest.
• Compare against the whole mat. The rubber base is most of the thickness, not the felt you can see.
• Outward opening doors are free. The leaf travels away from the mat, so clearance never comes into it and the mat can sit tight against the threshold.
• Storm doors are the tight case. The outer door normally clears less than the main one, so measure that leaf rather than the one behind it.

What the extra width actually buys

Three feet across turns a mat from something you step on into something you walk across. Two footfalls take off substantially more than one, and a shorter mat only ever gets the one. The width also changes how the mat looks under a wide opening, where a smaller mat floats in the middle of the threshold and reads as undersized however good the artwork is.

• Wide single doors and sidelights. A 36 inch face spans the door itself and reaches toward the glass instead of floating in the middle of the threshold. For double doors, two of these side by side cover about 72 inches.
• Angled approaches. Someone cutting across a porch still lands on the mat rather than beside it.
• More than one person at the door. A delivery, a group arriving or a child waiting behind an adult all stay on the mat instead of stepping off it.

Where the large size is the wrong call

Size stops helping the moment the mat has to be forced into a space. On a shallow apartment landing a 36 inch mat can run past your own threshold and into a shared walkway or a neighbor's door, which many buildings do not allow and which puts the mat where nobody expects a trip edge. A deep alcove has the opposite problem: the mat fits, but people are already past it by the time they reach the door.

• Shallow landings. Measure the depth from threshold to the edge of the walkway before assuming the mat will sit inside your own space.
• Carpeted entries. A rubber base has nothing to bite into on carpet, so the mat travels and rucks at the corners.
• Recessed doorways. Set the mat where the last two steps happen, not where the frame is.

Placing it and keeping it looking new

Once clearance is settled, the mat wants to sit centered on the door opening with its long edge parallel to the threshold, close enough that nobody can step over it. The rest is upkeep, and upkeep on a printed felt face has its own short set of rules.

• Leave no landing strip. A gap of bare floor between mat and threshold is where the dirt you just removed gets put back on.
• Pair it with a mat inside. An 18x27 mat indoors takes the fine dust the outside mat scraped loose, which is why entries with two mats stay cleaner than entries with one large one.
• Clean it as a printed surface. The care that keeps the color is set by the print, and it is covered on the printed door mat page.