Saturday, June 4, 2011

Zapped

Oooh... I'm feelin' weary tonight!

Matt and I have spent the whole day working on house projects. The biggest chunk of our time was spent on the basement flooring project. We can't quite afford to put down carpet or Pergo downstairs right now, but we had to do something about the horrible cement floor down there. I couldn't stand the thought of living with the floors the way they were for the next few years while we saved up for our dream floors. So, we decided that we would just give the cement floor a new coat of paint and a minor facelift. We moved the furniture, cleaned and prepped the floors, masked the baseboards, put down two coats of epoxy paint, and laid down some decorative paint flakes to go on top.

We finished up at about 10pm, and still have only gotten *half* of the basement finished. It's taking way, way longer than we thought it would, but so far it's a great improvement. I'm so happy to say goodbye to the diarrhea-brown cement down there. It was literally the worst color I've ever seen. It's mind-boggling that someone would have actually chosen to paint the floor that color. Awful, awful, awful.

Here are a few pictures of the project in progress.


Behold the brownscape!

The basement floor used to have seams in the cement, about 1/2 inch deep. They were impossible to keep clean, and everytime I swept the floor, all the dust and junk would settle down in the crevass.

Matt filled in the seams before we painted the floor. Yay!

Here's the new "slate gray" basement floor, minus the gunky seams and horrible brown-ness.

Here's the floor after the second coat of paint and the decorative flake topping.

I'm just starting to get the hang of the decorative-flake distribution process. It's not perfect, but I'm really liking the results so far.

So, back to the grind tomorrow. Can't wait to get the second half of the basement finished. Hopefully, it'll look much better down there than it did before. I definitely think it'll be a big improvement.

5 comments:

K. C. Wells said...

That is a fantastic transformation!! Your hard work is really paying off. The basement is going to be such a great hang-out spot.

Anonymous said...

What a great job you are doing. You should be soooo very proud of your hard work! It is really paying off! I love it!!!!

Mom in Mo

jwjacole said...

Huge! Huge! Improvement over the ugly color before. Great job! You're almost there. Owning a house is a work in progress. When there's time, there's no money and when there's money there's no time. It's worth it in the end.

dove said...

Love it! Your flake distribution looks fantastic.

Trevor said...

That looks awesome. It *almost* makes up for my disappointment when I discovered that your post did not focus upon the early-1980s Scott Baio movie.