Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Finished (with part 1)




So here is our floor completely finished with 3 coats of "wet look sealer" on it. Pretty nice. I still feel it's just a bit too dark but....I am much happier with it sealed.
You can see it on the one side of the room with the tan sofa on it and the other (slightly more mottle side) of the room gives a different perspective. I had to work so that the windows didn't show in the floor pictures. They are so shiny their like dark mirrors almost. (Dusting may be an annoying issue in the future......)
Overall it's MUCH better than what we had. The sealer is great even though I make dusting comments---so glossy and silky underfoot. Before it always felt, no matter how clean the floor was, that your feet were dirty and you needed to scrub them off before getting into bed. Now, they don't at all. Wonderful. I think I am almost more impressed with the sealer rather than the stain :-D
Now---we are moving all the furniture into that room and are going to finish the other half. We still need to caulk some molding on the ceiling, paint the whole thing, sand and clean off gunk on the floor then we will be ready to stain and seal again. Really this part is the quickest part. It sounds as if it will take a while but the caulking is almost done (just a few spots where so much furniture was stacked from the other room I couldn't get to the spots)and painting will only take a couple hours. The floor clean up will be a few hours too. No big deal. By next week---voila! A whole brand new downstairs. Yeah!
Then of course I need curtains, new headboard, rugs, pictures hahahaaha Never ending!! But at least that's the "funner" part that includes shopping and much less manual labor!!

We've already been asked a number of times about this since we started if others can do it and my answer is: Yes, it is easy. Yes, overall it looks good and Yes, even the most basic of "beginner" home remodeler can handle this project.
As I said---start with your garage floor (which is what I should have done) to kind of "learn" your stain. I think overall it will give that small bit of practice first. The cost is negligible. Every bit of this project is cheap. I have maybe $100 invested in the part I have done. That includes everything from sand paper to scraping tools to a new roller, dye and sealer. Definitely one of the cheaper projects with great impact. If you make your own stain using the link from the other day (or find another site) it would be even cheaper. I would absolutely practice on my garage with home made stain just to make sure it was going to end up being the color I thought it was though.

Thanks Robbyn for the nice comment :-)
By the way I like your new header picture---very attractive and almost the same color as my floor!

Have a great day all.

2 comments:

Cheryl said...

Wow, I go away for a few days and look what happens! I love the way your floor turned out, and these posts couldn't be more timely. We're putting radiant floor heating in our basement slab and are planning to stain the concrete. I was even thinking of a brown, leathery look - great minds, eh? Can't wait to see the basement come together!

Robbyn said...

You're welcome, and wow, that floor looks seriously terrific! I bet it'll stand up great to traffic, too...