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!