Painting A Concrete Floor
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Tagged sandalhood : RC's entry about one of her projects
I first took up the carpet with the help of 5 eleven year old boys. They had fun. I then was disgusted by how much dirt had accumulated under there, so I actually took a picture of that! Anyway, I scraped all of the sheetrock mud up with a scraper (I’m sure there’s a tool to do that, but I didn’t want to spend the $ to buy one) What the scraper didn’t get I came back and smoothed out with a sanding block with very coarse paper. After I vacuumed all of that, I cleaned it with a scrub brush and ammonia, making sure that all of that mud was up. After it dried completely, I filled the holes (with concrete filler) that were left when I’d pulled up the carpet. I let that dry completely and then sanded with very coarse sand paper to smooth it out somewhat. Again, there’s tools to do this, but I’m to cheap!!
After the concrete was very clean and dry I painted it with a primer called Gripper Primer (water based). The guy at home depot said that it’s supposed to stick to anything and anything is supposed to stick to it! I then painted two coats of my bottom coat and let dry for approximately two weeks or more (Ha!) because at that time I didn’t know what I was going to do with it!! Anyway, I ended up finding the center of the room and masking off an 18” “tile”, from there I measured off my other tiles working my way to the walls. I used that blue painters tape which they didn’t have in the size that I needed for my “grout”, so I just used a box cutter to cut the roll in half. You could make your grout any size though, I suppose. I then ragged on a translucent glaze/stain using cheese cloth. I ragged on probably 3 layers to get it to the color I thought it should be. Also, when ragging on the stain, I did so more heavily toward my grout lines to make them look like real tiles do. Know what I mean? After that dried completely I took up the painters tape with the help of my Mama! Then I put a water based sealer on top of that….Yes, three coats, painted on with a paint brush, on my hands and knees. I started rolling on the sealer but liked the way it looked better brushed on for some reason. The primer and base coats were both rolled on though. The gap that was left between the baseboard and the concrete was too big to cover using quarter round, so I got something that looks to be about the width of a yardstick to finish that out. I thought that would be much easier than pulling up the baseboards and lowering them because then you’d have to paint the walls where they’d been.
The base coat paint and the stain I bought were both “Oops we goofed” paint at home depot. Very good paint that someone rejected because it wasn’t the exact color. It was $4 a gallon.
The primer was about $20 and the sealer was the most expensive, around $30. I did both rooms for under $100.
Ideally a project like this would be more durable using oil based paints, but I just don’t like dealing with that toxic stuff. So far it seems to be holding up fine.