You may remember me telling you about helping my mom renovate her house. The projects are sporadic and come when the money is there. So, sometimes you have to live with something until you have it in the budget to do something else. Like carpet for instance...or lack there of :) This little bedroom that was created out of half the dining room and a closet has been lacking carpet since it's existence. Yes, we could put carpet or flooring in, but we want it to match the rest of the house and the rest of the house's flooring won't be done for at least another year. So, until then, these poor floors have been left undressed. Yep, showing nothing but plywood. Ugly? Yep. But, once again, you gotta live with what you've got :) But, you can always make what you've got a little more palatable.
We decided that for the the mean time, it would be a great idea to paint the plywood sub-floor and make it resemble hardwood. Now, we didn't get into the details of adding lines and what not, we decided to save our sanity and just painted it dark brown. Plus, a rug was going to cover up a majority of the floor anyway.
This is how it started. Super dusty and gross.
The first step was to painstakingly take out all of the loose staples. The ones that would bug our feet if walked on. Doing this didn't loosen the plywood, at least in this case. I'm sure if they were all pulled up, it would probably loosen them up.
Next was getting a mop and mopping the floors, getting all the dirt and dust off the floor.
Once the floors were dry, we started painting. We began in the corners and along the baseboards.
We went along all the edges.
And then finished up painting in the middle.
Such a difference! But I wanted to make sure all this hard work wouldn't get scraped up...
..so, polycrylic to the rescue! Since we used a latex based paint, we went with a water based poly.
To apply it, we used a long stick attached to a foam like brush. This gave it a really smooth finish.
We went in the same order as with the paint, applying the poly to the edges and corners first and then to the rest of the room.
It does take quite awhile to dry. We did 3 coats of poly with at least 24 hour dry time between each coat.
The shine of the poly is the perfect finishing touch!
This room came together so nicely, it's a shame that we live so far away or else I would have our kiddos visit and stay over more often. They love this room!
Oh, and just an FYI, this does not count as flooring. A home evaluation was done in the process of doing this project and they dinged the value for not having flooring in this room and one other room. Even nasty dingy carpet has a higher value than this :)
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