I think I've mentioned (more than once) that our house has hardwood floors throughout. Beautiful, yes, but the "beauty of hardwoods" that everyone talks about loses its lustre about this time every year. Since carpets and area rugs are pretty dang expensive, we get to experience our floors in all their ice-cold glory as soon as the thermometer dips below 40. I started to get desperate, and although this isn't a permanent fix, it's a stylish and cheap way to cover a small area of your floor.
After digging out a fairly large nautical chart that I had sitting around in a closet (my original plan, three years ago, was to frame it until I discovered it would be about $500 to frame my $20 chart), I brought it to a local copy shop to have it laminated. A couple of hours and $18 later, I had a new front hall floor covering that reminded me a bit of those handpainted canvas floorclothes that I had seen in showhouses and shelter publications. Make sure to use a little sticky-tack around the edges when you place it on the floor, and you're good to go.