Another post!? And it hasn't been a month yet?! I know! I must be really rocking and rolling or something, eh?
I do stuff almost all the time. I have a hard time just sitting around. But it is so much easier for me to just post pictures on Instagram and keep going, then to stop and write up a blog with pictures and everything. However, I have had several people ask me about the pictures I have posted over the last several days of me redoing my bathroom floor, so here I am, posting another blog entry.
Let me start by saying that I have really, really, REALLY hated my kids' bathroom floor for a while, now. It was white, linoleum squares. I have two teenage girls and two dogs. Not a good combination!
Back in September, when I repainted my college kid's room, I had extra paint. It occurred to me, then, that it would be a very easy thing for me to use the rest of the paint on the bathroom floor. Anything would look better than what was down. I figured I could probably pull it off in a weekend, so I mentioned it to the other kid. She was not very enthusiastic about the brown color, and really kind of hinted that it might not be the best decorating decision. Ha!
She was right. I had redone the rest of the bathroom last spring, and brown wasn't exactly complementary.
So, I used the brown to paint my front door, and headed to Home Depot to get black.
First, I scraped up the linoleum and tried to get to just the cement slab. That was the hard part. I knew about the white tiles, but those typically come up pretty easily. After getting started, though, I found this.
YUCK!! And that roll out stuff usually takes WAY more effort to get up. There is SO much adhesive, plus 20-years of traffic and dirt and countless water issues to only make it a big pain.
I started scraping about 8:00pm, on a Friday night, and finished getting the bulk of it scraped and swept by around midnight. It was WORK and I was very tired and sore.
Here are the tools I used.
Too late I realized that gloves were a MUST!
As you can see, when I gave up and went to bed, there was still paper backing and glue on the floor.
The next day, I used soapy water and the small scraper to slowly get the floor as clean and bare as possible. I almost gave up and just went to buy more roll out vinyl, but I was feeling cheap and paint is only $25, so I kept at it.
All the experts will tell you to use an etching solution to clean the cement, or to sand the floor with a pole sander and very course grit. It's ALWAYS recommended as a MUST. I didn't do it. I just didn't want to spend the $$ or wait the time. Maybe it would have been easier that wearing out a pair of gloves, and my back, with the scraping. I just don't know.
Once you have bare cement, the rest is easy. Sweep. Vacuum. Mop. Sweep. I tried really hard to be sure I got up as much stuff as possible.
Then I put down the cement bonder/primer and let it sit for 8 hours.
This was leftover from when I first pulled up carpet and painted cement 3-years ago. I still have a bunch left. Considering doing my patio....maybe.
I got the porch and patio floor paint from Home Depot and painted it on.
I did something similar in my daughters room several years ago, but I was pulling up carpet then. For that, you have to fill in all the gaps from the carpet tack with cement patch. That will add another day to the turnaround time.
I did see this at HD, http://thd.co/1s86xUv and I keep thinking how much pizzazz it would add, but does a bathroom floor really need glitter?? We shall see which side of my personality wins out.
At any rate, the floor already looks insanely better than what was there, and I spent less than $30. Granted, if you are having to buy everything for the first time, you will spend more. Seems like the primer is about $20, plus rollers and painters tape… So for about $60. But I have so much left over that I can use for other projects, that I don't feel like I actually spent that much money for the bathroom.
Total Cost: just under $30 for paint and Dollar Tree rollers.
Total time: 2 full days. Scraping was one day, primer and paint another.
Outcome: SUCCESS!
Now go Make-Do something of your own.
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