#Slice2013 - Day 3 of 31

And we're off!

Sort of.

The Husband and I spent another day in our new home, scraping and cleaning and painting. We have a long list of to-do's looming ahead of us, but currently the most daunting is the kids' rooms. Since we want their rooms to look and feel like home as soon as we move in, we decided to tackle them first. So far, we've scraped off the popcorn texture on both ceilings and taken up the carpet.

When we started, this felt like a very wise decision. Halfway into the project, we're feeling a little uncertain.

I handled this by avoiding those rooms today. I needed to feel a sense of accomplishment, so when my mom-in-love offered to help paint trim in the living room I decided to spend the day painting. (While The Husband sanded and grinded and cursed the general condition of the floors in those other rooms we won't be speaking of.)

Halfway through our trim painting project, The Husband comes out and I can see on his face that things are not going well.

So I put up my paintbrush and pulled out the iPad to research more ideas for how to fix the problem.

The problem being that sanding and scrubbing is not doing much to remove the squiggly glue stains left behind after scraping all that nasty padding and glue from the concrete. Our plan is to stain one room in a fun harlequin pattern in the Little's room and stain the Big's floor something more urban/industrial. We're worried that those squiggles just won't disappear beneath the stain. So... to Google for the rescue! And Home Depot. Those guys are seriously helpful to the DIY-challenged.

I've seen countless tutorials on blogs and YouTube, but everyone uses a different method and much of the information I've found doesn't match up. It's hard to decide what method is best, since we'd like to be able to do these floors one time and be done with it!

After I spent some time easing The Husband's mind about the floors, I rejoined the painting efforts in the living room. We managed to finish all the trim on our picture frame molding paneling and even put the grey on the panels - both inside and outside the molding. It's simply gorgeous. Even The Husband felt better after seeing how good this room will look when the painting is completed! I'm glad we decided to spend some time in the living room - it takes away some of the sting from the frustration with the bedrooms floors.

Tomorrow we'll be back in the house with a unified effort to get those floors ready. With the condition that they're currently in, we're leaning towards painting instead of staining. We know the primer and paint will cover the glue stains, and I'm hoping that taking the extra time to put a coat of poly over the paint will keep them looking nice for a while.

Either way, I'm excited to get back in the house tomorrow and be one step closer to moving in! I'll be posting pictures soon of what we started with and where we are now. Though I think I'll save all the finished pictures for one big "reveal" post. And if anyone has suggestions for those concrete floors, I'm listening!