Sunday, March 30, 2008

Do I look stupid to you?

Well don't be fooled- I am. In school, people always thought I was smart. I'm not sure what it was but I was usually considered one of the "smart kids" but that's not really the case, I made decent grades but i certainly wasn't smart. Now, I'm just plain stupid.
We had another huge house project this weekend. One that I have been putting off for a year but always wanted to do. We stained our den concrete. We have been working on this project from about 1:00 Friday afternoon until minutes ago at 9:30 Sunday night. I love the results but it was a HUGE project. I would be happy to give you advise if you want to do the same thing but there's no way i'm doing this again. Here's how it went...

First we had to pull up the carpet, and the pad, and the tack strips all around the room, then sweep up the mess and dust and see what we were working with. While we had hoped to find pristine concrete under the carpet we instead found that the previous owners had a paint fight on the concrete. So, we poured all kinds of brain damaging chemicals on the concrete to remove the paint and scrubbed and made 4 trips to Lowes and scrubbed some more. There was glue, footprints, paint can rings- all kinds of things. Late Friday night we went to bed and figured that was as good as it was going to get.

Here is mike pulling up the tack strips. He worked so hard this whole weekend. I'm not kidding, if you want someone to work as hard as possible on your project without stopping, he's the one.



Here's what it looked like when we were finished cleaning the concrete before going to bed. So clean you could eat on it, it just doesn't look like it!

Next step is to apply the stain. The concrete had to be wet then you spray on the stain. Let it dry for 4 hours then wash the floor with baking soda and water. Well, according to the video, only one water/soda scrubbing will do but for us- 3 scrubs later we finally stopped. By "scrub" i mean, pour water on, scrub with brush, wet vac up the water, test to see if the color is still coming up.



After that dries you roll on an epoxy sealer and wait 12-24 hrs. for that to dry. The picture above is shown mostly finished and we are still waiting for the sealer to dry. Hopefully we can move the furniture back on tomorrow and I'll post pictures then. It's very crazy but we love it!

7 comments:

Linda said...

I really like it! It looks so rich, and I love the way the color mutates into different shades. Your furniture is going to look so pretty once you get everything back in, and that really won't take that long, will it! Good job Harvey's! No project to big for you all!

Jules said...

It looks even better than you described - very nice!!

Lexi said...

oh your blog made me tired...home projects always make me tired!! It looks good though!

I have decided that someday I need to see your house in person. It looks so cute!

My latest project (that Chris and I worked on this weekend) was painting the eye-sore-of-a-door to our garage from the kitchen. We have these beautiful new cabinets and ugly door to clash with it all. Chris spent hours sanding all the "gunk" off of it, we replaced the old brassy hinges and door knob with brushed nickel and I primed the door. I have decided to paint the door with chalkboard paint to make the entire surface a chalkboard!! Hehe! I am a dork, but I am super excited about it and I know Mia, Jules and Atlee will love it when I am finished.

Unknown said...

I love the floors!!!

DesignKat said...

WOW!! It looks amazing. You guys did a great job. Give Mike a big hug...he's such a hard worker. I can't wait to see it in person.

Connie said...

I seriously can't believe y'all did that. I can't even get motivated to paint the writing on the wall that we discussed!

Looks really really great and Levi and I will definitely take you up on the tips b/c we hope to do that someday in our future house....far far away in some unknown land......

Anjolee said...

That is SO pretty. I really like stained concrete and y'all did such a good job.

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