The Horror of a Pink Floor

From the start of the floor-staining ambitions I've pictured the floor as a warm brown/burgundy combo - swirled and mottled and generally more interesting than a flat color. As it turns out, interesting isn't hard to come by in stained concrete. Huh.

Everyone had a different theory on how I should apply the stain, but generally the consensus was that if you want more uniform color a roller is good and less uniform color you use something more irregular - string mop, rags, whatever. Given that I wanted irregular I went for the string mop.

The color is semi-transparent and layer 1, which was brown, went on easily and looked completely blah and boring - flat, kind of dead-ish brown. I went to talk to the paint guys at Lowe's about the brown/red idea and they suggested a red called 'gem stone' which provided hours of fun and entertainment and at least one melt-down.

Apparently semi-transparent isn't actually the same in all colors and different colors have different levels of transparency. Who would have known this?

Long story short is that gem stone is apparently so close to not being transparent that it mops on to the floor in big terrifying dark pink/fuchsia streaks that immediately start to absorb into the concrete and don't want to wipe away causing minor hysteria. Fun! Nobody could ever say it was flat and boring.

Thankfully I started in a corner that is going to be largely hidden by other things, so the shockingly pink part of the floor will be mostly covered. In the end I had to dilute 'gem stone' with about one part stain to five parts water to increase the 'transparency' and then put another brown coat on top of it to tone it down.

All in all the final product looks pretty good - a swirly brown-red that is warm and pretty without being the center of attention in the room, which is good. I don't want people staring at the glare coming off of a hot pink floor all the time or anything. That would have been a little bit different than the look I was trying to achieve.

I'm really happy it's done because that means that I can actually get my furniture! Woohoo!

Etching Concrete

The concrete saga is never-ending. It really feels like it's been weeks of crawling around scraping little bits of stuff off of the floor - paint, ceiling texture, wall stuff, glue, god only knows what else. The good news is that yesterday we finally reached the stage where we felt like we could etch it to get ready for staining.

Staining the floor is the next major milestone simply because once I have a floor, I can actually get my furniture out of storage and start living like an almost-normal person. With chairs and things. Major step forward in Amy's world.

As it turns out, etching the concrete is really really fun. You get all kitted up in what feels like a hazmat suit - wellies (rubber boots, for those of you who haven't the foggiest what I'm talking about), rubber gloves, body condom if you happen to have one lying around. Then, you pour acid all over the floor and scrub it around with stiff broom. Then the fun really begins. Now you bring the garden hose inside your living room, which defies any and all sense of normalcy, Essentially then you spend the rest of the day hosing water onto your living room floor and squeegeeing it out the back door with a giant squeegee.

In all, there is something really satisfying about spraying out your house with a garden hose. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it satisfies some internal joy in doing-what-I'm-not-supposed-to. Maybe that's it. Of course it could just be the ridiculousness of it all, or the opportunity to wear wellies. Who knows?

After the car-wash-style etching, then came the concrete primer, which was considerably less fun. Picture spreading watered-down elmer's glue all over the floor - I'm relatively sure I've never been so sticky in my whole life. Also had a minor panic incident this morning when I came downstairs to find the floor all streaky from the nonsense primer. Damn damn. Mom and dad managed to calm me down by pointing out that it's probably just not quite dry in some areas and so those areas look darker, not that my floor is forever going to look like a streaky mess. At least we're hoping that's what's happening. In truth, none of us have done this before so really, they could be making this all up. The best news is that if it looks absolutely aweful, we can always just paint over it with a solid color and forget about the stain entirely.