#Slice2013 - Day 31 of 31

A month in reverse...

Easter celebrated with family,
A beautiful finished harlequin floor,
Lunch with friends and a reminder to make time for the happy moments,
A phone call that may just lead to a dream job,
Wrote side by side with eager learners,
Shared the power of "believe" with Dos,
Remembered the strength in helping people be their best,
Time with The Husband turning our house into a home,
Stepped out on faith and still trusting the process,
Asked questions of my learners instead of giving them the answers,
Said yes to a possibility that holds infinite rewards,
Found the strength to be honest about where my shame hides,
Enjoyed quiet moments at home with Dos and The Husband,
Thankful for Dos' quick recovery from the surgery that rattled my nerves,
Learned patience and dedication through our work in the house,
Beat my head against the wall over floors that didn't want to be transformed,
Laughed with friends over ridiculous Shakespearean insults,
Stretched my ability to grow comfortable with my soon-to-be 20 year old son,
Grabbed up my old writing self and refuse to let her go,
Connected with the reasons to hold fast to dreams,
Became an experienced floor grinding, concrete sanding, staining expert,
Searched my heart for the path I want to be on,
Reflected on my life as a writer,
Lived through an in-home dust storm,
Cherished my mom on her special day,
Lamented the pains of a boy that I miss every moment,
Sent out a passionate call to action for educators everywhere,
Battled it out with The Husband on the first round of floor tear down,
Finally (finally) chose the right shade of grey for the living room and took action,
Told the truth of my hermit crab mental life,
Made a promise to write without ceasing for thirty-one days.

All in all, I'd call March a success.

My heart is full, my life is energized, my family and friends are healthy.

And it only gets better from here. April is already promising to offer more everyday blessings.

I'm ready to get started. How about you?

#Slice2013 - Day 24 o 31

But what about the floor?

This floor is how I spent most of my day. Still unfinished, but nearly done. And I love it.

I love that after The Husband's original paper rendition didn't quite match the look I was hoping for didn't work out, I gave it a try myself. I love that I struggled through the math bits that I hate and figured out how to align everything the right way. I love that The Husband and I took my paper measurements and were able to work together to measure and layout the design on the floor. I even loved learning how to use a chalk line, even though it hurt my fingers! And I love that we put the lines on the floor together.

I've been painting in the dark blue diamonds with a sponge brush, and although it takes quite a bit of time, I truly enjoy it. Every outline is difficult, with me arched over the space I'm working on, arm braced against a knee or leg or floor, delicately following the sometimes barely-there chalk line, to make a perfect-as-I-can-manage straight line. But I feel so good about the work I have put into this floor.

The Littles run up to the doorway every once in a while and cheer me on. So also, I love how excited they are about the floor I'm creating for their room.

And all that frustrationangeraggravationdespair that made me regret ever having torn up the carpet in the first place?

Gone.

I love this floor, and the home that it is in, and my family that will soon, oh so soon, be moving in.

#Slice2013 - Day 17 of 31

You started with this:

I'm a completely move-in ready room!

But thought to yourselves, "Selves? Could this be better?"

And of course the answer was, "Heck yeah!"

So you got the right tools...

And did this:

With a little water, removing popcorn texture is super easy.

But was that enough? Heck no!
You needed more awesome for this room.
So you tore up the carpet and The Husband busted loose all the tack strip:

I think the curtains really make a difference at this point, don't you?

 Tearing up a room makes a mess, so you make sure to wear a fancy pink dust mask, as seen here:

I'm ready for house renovating and the end of the world. What now??

 It's important to wear your mask when you use the shopvac to get all the nasty dust, texture, and sanding residue off the floor. Notice even the curtains had to back out at this point. This procedure is not for the faint of heart. You will get dirty. You might cough and hack and think you're dying (but only if you're overly dramatic, which I am, so you can imagine what The Husband had to deal with!)

And don't forget to fill in all those dumb holes you made when you pulled up the carpet! Oddly, when your house was built, no one ever thought you'd actually want to remove the carpet or do anything like this. You'll need some Quickcrete and a 4" inch painter's blade to splat that stuff in there:

At this point, you're probably thinking you're done! Afterall, you've already been working on this room for over a week, and all the other blogs you've read did their room in a weekend...

Jokes on you! You are not done. Sanding and use of deadly chemicals did not remove all the paint and glue off your concrete, so your floor still looks like this:

This means it's time to break out the big guns, baby. Head to Home Depot and get a Diamond bladed concrete grinder. If you rent it after 6pm on a Friday night and return it at 9am the next morning, you only have to pay the 4 hour rental fee. Winning!

Once again, you'll be very happy you have those industrial dust masks!

When you finish slamming the concrete grinder off the walls and spinning around like a hummingbird, which will only take an hour or so, your floor will look like this:

Hi. I am the paint near the baseboards. I can outlive anything. I laugh at your floor project dreams! Ha!

Eventually you decide the paint around the baseboards will add a vintage look, and you move on.

Wash wash wash wash your floor, and vac vac vac vac vac it up. Then do it again. If you are heavy on the OCD, run a white glove over the surface and check for residue. Once you believe it's clean enough for people to eat off of, it's time to roll on the primer! We used all Behr products, because that's what the good folks at Home Depot sold us.

It's okay to weep with joy as you finally turn the corner and start the staining portion of your project!

Once the primer dries, you're ready to get that floor stained! The can of stain tells you to use a sprayer to apply the stain. So you do.

Note the sexy "booties" we wore to keep the floor clean. I am not joking about keeping this floor clean, you guys.

After spraying down the floor in your chosen stain color of "Coal Dust" or "Dusty Coal" or whatever crazy name Behr's uses for black, you walk away to let it dry. You walk away, even though your brain is thinking, "Um, that doesn't look exactly how I thought it would..."

Am I a floor, or a speckled egg?

Maybe I am hipster leopard print?

After the stain dries, you sit down on the floor and have a little pity party. This is not what you wanted. You decide to paint on the second coat, then use a "ragging off" method with some scrunched up cloths to fill in all those speckles...

You spend the day painting the floor, feeling like a home remodeling superstar.

In the end, however, you question your decision. Couldn't it be darker? Wouldn't that be better?

Yes, you decide. Yes, it would.

So you test out several spray patterns using water on the sidewalk. Your new neighbors may look at you strangely, wondering why you water the sidewalk and not the grass. Don't mind them. They obviously aren't remodeling superstars like you are. 

When you are confident of your new-found spraying prowess, you take a third spin on that floor.

Hallelujah bells! We have a winner!

Close-up for the new beauty queen.

And again, you wait for it to dry. Hopinghopinghoping it doesn't all somehow get sucked up into the concrete and turn into something different.

But all your hard work pays off.

You have a floor.

Which, to be honest, you had in the beginning of all this nonsense.

This floor is just more awesome.

Just the way you like things.

All I need is a couple coats of shiny sealer, and I'm good to go!

#Slice2013 - 11 of 31

The High Cost of Prepping and Staining a Concrete Floor

I wish I had taken the time to count hours and money spent on this floor. I'd love to look back and say, "Man, that 383 hours preparing the floor was totally worth it!"

But the truth is, I have just a rough idea of how long we've been butting our heads against concrete while throwing cash in the air:

• Two hours ripping up carpet and tack strip. ($0!)
• Two hours filling holes with Quickcrete and sanding the patches. ($5)
• Three hours sweeping and vacuuming and scraping away at glue and paint. ($25 for mostly useless paint stripper!)
• Four hours to use the huge concrete grinder and vacuum up the mess it left. ($100!! Eek!)
• Five hours to scrape up more paint around the baseboards, then scrub the entire floor by hand and vacuum up the insane amounts of water that -- the whole time -- I was thinking this is a very bad idea. ($0!)
• Four hours spent scrubbing, mopping, and vacuuming both floors until they were smooth and as paint-free as they are going to ever be. ($0 but so much freaking out about the amount of water sloshing around on the floor!)
• One hour priming both floors. ($25ish?)
• 15 minutes spraying on the first coat of stain in the boys' room. ($25)

And that's where we are so far. Yes, I finally have some stain on a floor! It's a miracle! No, seriously guys, it's a miraculous feeling to be on this side of the floor project. I still need to buy the stain for the other room - two colors so a total of $50. And the low gloss sealer, which I believe is $25. So, total cash-dollah cost to redo both floors is coming in right around $255, give or take a few. The man power and muscle put into this craziness has been much more exhausting than the money spent. And I've yet to get into the other room and start hand painting the harlequin pattern. I'm actually pumped to do that. Now that we've opened one can of the stain and I know what I'm working with, I have a much better idea of how to paint it on the other floor.

After we sprayed the first coat on tonight, it definitely left a mottled appearance as it was supposed to, but I'm not sure that spraying a second coat will fill in the patchy spots to my liking. Instead, I'm going to roll on small sections and then use a rag to splotch it all around. I'm sure there's a much more professional way to explain this process. But that's what I've got: splotching the floors.

I'll be doing that tomorrow morning, and prayingprayingpraying all this hard work pays off. I'm excited. If it works how I'm hoping, we'll have a beautiful glossy black splotched floor in a couple of days. Huzzah!

But for tonight, a bath and some well earned sleep are all I want to think about.

#Slice2013 - 4 of 31

Second verse, same as the first!

Tonight The Husband and I tried once more to get those crazy bedroom floors squeaky clean. Well, okay. He tried, I offered help, he got frustrated, and I left him scraping goo and got out my paintbrush.

Painting is very therapeutic, you guys! I finished another half of a wall when he finally came out of his grumpy cave to discuss our serious floor issue. It went a little something like this:

The Husband (TH): This is impossible! I hate floors! Nothing works! I'm going to burn the house down!*

Me (M): I feel we should reassess what is really going on here, and also that you may be acting slightly over-dramatic.

TH: RAWR! ANGER! STUPID FLOORS ARE DUMB!

M: Um. I could do the floors and you can paint? Also, stop whining.

TH: That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard! I will do it!

M: Okay, so do it and stop being grumpy.

TH: (stomp stomp stomp stomp)

Half an hour later, he came back and stood quietly in the living room.

M: Sooo... the floors.

TH: Do not discuss that which shall not be named.

*I should probably add a disclaimer that this is highly paraphrased and possibly embellished for dramatic effect... also, isn't it totally believable how much calmer I was than The Husband? I'm pretty cool that way.

At this point, I cleaned up the paint supplies and we headed back to the apartment. The Husband was silent the whole way home, and when The Husband is silent, I know we have problems. I told him I had to stop at the grocery store on the way back, but really it was just a ruse to get him into Home Depot. I'm not sure if it's just because he can cut up in there with the guys, and honestly I don't care what it is, but he always feels better after we run our current situation by them.

Sure enough, our good friends Jasen and Mike (I'm not sure they consider us good friends, but after the way they helped make The Husband feel better about our wacky floors, I feel like I should buy them a pizza or something) talked us through the next phase of getting the-floors-which-shall-not-be-named into stain-happy condition!

And that phase is: giant rolling floor grinder thingy! I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty excited about getting a big power tool in this room that has made my husband so angry and letting this floor know who is boss. Say goodbye, carpet glue! Your time is up!

Once the grinding is done, we'll wash and vacuum a few times to make sure it sparkles, and then I finally get to attack the floor with some stain. I'm hoping to achieve a harlequin pattern with small paint border in the Littles' room. The paint border should hide the mismatched concrete colors where we filled nail holes from tack strips. To see the look I'm going for, you can check out this great DIY guide. My colors will be very different, however. But I'll show you that when I'm done! I'm a little nervous about making my lines straight without any feathering over of colors, but I really want this floor. The Bigs' floor with be much simpler! We're just doing a semi-transparent stain in a dark color to help achieve the urban feel I want in that room. Maybe I should do their room first, just to get acclimated to using stain.

Either way, I feel like we're on track again. I just hope our Home Depot bff's are right!

#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!