Wednesday, June 9, 2010

concrete floors

In some recent posts, many of you apparently noticed my floors.  I've received quite a few comments and emails asking about my floors.  My most recent post showed you an example of my floors.
Here's another view of the floors.


Throughout most of our downstairs, we have painted concrete floors. These floors are one of my favorite things in the house.  In the picture above, you see the first entry area has hardwood and originally most everything else was carpeted.  I hate carpet.  When you have boys and dogs, the carpet gets yucky really fast.  We considered just putting hardwood floors everywhere but 1) that is expensive! and 2) I have two big chocolate labs whose ginormous claws scratch hardwood floors so that they just aren't that pretty.  Since hardwood is expensive or labor-intensive to refinish, we decided to just pull up all the carpet and paint the floors.  I would love to pull up that hardwood and do the same.  (hopefully that will be a future project).  We used concrete floor paint in a dark brown and painted it on.  We didn't want a perfect floor because we wanted a bit of character.


After applying the paint, we finished with a couple of coats of poly sealer.  It held up really well for a couple of years and then it started to show wear.  I actually liked some of the wear because I didn't want it to look so new.  I wanted it to look aged, time-worn.
But then, this happened:
It didn't happen everywhere.  It happened mostly by the back door and by the stairs where these two little darlings jump, run and slide the most.
Ballou (she's not usually this calm at the back door)

Bella (yep, she's sleeping on top of a coffee table up in the TV room.  My husband thinks this is so cute.  I have other opinions.  This dog is a bit wierd different anyway. See those ginormous nails she has?)

But guess what?  If the floor chips or wears too much for your taste, you just repaint.  It's so much easier and cheaper than refinishing floors.

Probably if we had added more coats of poly or prepped like the directions said to, it would have lasted a bit longer. I believe stain would have lasted longer as well.  It doesn't matter to us.  We love the concrete floors.  If something spills, who cares?  It just wipes up.  You can't hurt this floor.  Here's an unexpected bonus: Our neighbors recently had huge foundation issues.  They told us about huge cracks in their concrete slab foundation.  Our first thought was, "oh my goodness, I wonder if we have problems with our foundation?"  Oh wait, we see our foundation everyday.  It's our floor.  Other than the original tiny hairline cracks and imperfections it started with (which I like), it's doing just fine.

The worst part of doing these floors was adding all of the trim moulding since removing the carpet left a gap between our baseboards and the floor.  That was a bit of a pain for my husband but it all looks great.  We haven't pulled up the carpet in the sunroom yet.  When I begin to redo that room this summer, we will get rid of the carpet and paint the floors the same color.  Hopefully, I'll get to show you a tutorial when it's done. 

Sorry for some of the bad photos in this post.  I wasn't planning on posting about my floors but so many of you had asked.  Today is a cloudy day and dark floors don't photograph well in a dark day so I had to use photos I already had.

I'm linking up to my favorite blog parties in my list above and down on the right


28 comments:

  1. I'm not sure you could do that in Canada because of the frost issues. I've seen concrete counters though, which I think are a clever idea. It sounds like, concrete floor is to you as cast iron frying pan is to me (just had to do a little speech analogy for you).

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  2. You just don't know how I'd LOVE to do this in our house. My concern is whether or not it will feel cold? Also, our house is like almost 30 years old, the front porch cement it cracked, so I don't know what lurks under the carpet. I'm skeered to pull it up, then realize the cement is in bad shape. We also have detestable vinyl flooring in our kitchen and entry that I'd LURVE to get rid of asap.

    You floors look fab!

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  3. Your floors look great and I would not have known they were concrete if you hadn't said so. My son is doing that to his floors in his basement since it got flooded.

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  4. Gina,
    Great post. I wish I could do concrete floors,seems like the upkeep is pretty easy. I have an old house and everything but the kitchen and bathrooms is hardwood. Thankfully the hardwood is so old it doesn't show the dog scratches so much.. I have slate floors in the front sunroom, which also serves as the main entrance, and the breezeway.
    If you ever plan to install slate, check with me first. I made all the mistakes that possibly can be made!
    I can't believe your dog bella sleeps on the coffee table!!!! How funny!
    Oh, almost forgot my questions...
    What style of house do you have?
    Does it have a basement? Just trying to figure out how the concrete flooring came to be.
    Rose

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  5. Wow, I would not have known that your floors were concrete! What a fabulous idea! May I ask how they go in cold weather, or do you not have very cold temperatures? I love that you can just paint over the bits that you need to!! Such cute labs too, we have a golden lab (but no sleeping on the coffee table allowed at our house). Hope you are having a wonderful day ~ Tina xx

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  6. I really like them and would go for it, but my husband is always cold...so he insists on carpet for most of the floors. My sister-in-law has them...they are stained and they look great.

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  7. Thanks, Gina! That's so awesome. Since our basement's not finished, and we're told over and over and over not to put carpet in (and everyone here in UT still does it, and STILL gets their basements flooded from time to time), I have been considering this route. You're swaying me. :)

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  8. I really like your floors. This would be ideal in a kitchen. Well, my kitchen. Because I'm messy.

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  9. Very cool. I'd like to do this in our basement. We put in the hickory floors all through the main level. 4 kids, 2 dogs (1 a lab), and they are scratched. Most of the time it doesn't bother me too much. Our upstairs has hardwood in the bedrooms, and did have carpet in the hall. Grossed me out. I pulled it out, and painted the subfloor with black paint. I love it. I'd like to put some poly over it after I paint it again. It's never filthy, and it really works with the hard wear and tear we put on it everyday!

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  10. Gorgeous!

    I love painted/stained concrete. But under our floors? Plywood.

    Not quite the same effect. ;)

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  11. In our basement we have concrete floors, but still have to stain them. I think concrete is wonderful for flooring- and easy to clean!

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  12. Very cool! I should have done this in our basement! It would have saved a lot of time and money!!!

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  13. You know, your post on your 'cement floors' just gave me the inspiration to do the same.. I've been redoing my entire downstairs and I pulled the laminate ugly flooring.. except in the L/Room.. ugly carpet.. I was thinking to do the entire down in "something" that would not break the bank... then I saw your floors.. I'm going to do it! The living room!
    Tell me.. did you have to 'sand' the concrete first.. was it very rough?
    Thanks so much for posting this!
    Sandy
    http://thewondersofdoing.blogspot.com/

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  14. My husband and I renovated our house in Australia last year. Instead of laying tiles, timber, or carpet, we polished the concrete slab. It was economical and it looks amazing (well, we think so and all of our friends and family do too). It almost looks like we inserted little stones and pieces of a broken mirror in the concrete. So easy to clean with little ones and a dog.

    Love your blog.

    Holly (3 Sisters, 365)
    x

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  15. we recently had our carpet pulled up and wood floors put down. It was a relief to see our foundation had ZERO cracks in it!!

    The floor looks great and with the pets, I think it is a wonderful choice!

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  16. I left two of our bathrooms concrete. Every few years I just repaint them....cheaper than new tile! Occasionally I paint a run on one. It's great to have worry free floors. Great job! Lisa~

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  17. Wow, that's really interesting. It must be a relief not to have to worry about damage.

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  18. So this must sound strange...but I saw a neat finish on concrete floors that was achieved by crumbling FRITOS on top of the wet paint. I'm not sure of the details, but I KNOW I have seen it done. It sort of pushed the paint away a little bit and gave it somewhat of a rough marbled look. Just thought I would share it with you because I thought it was so neat! :)

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  19. Just saw this post about your floors, we just did the same thing to ours, I love it so far. We did prime the concrete first and then applied paint and poly -a very labor intensive process but I think it will be well worth it.

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  20. Thanks for linking up to We Can Do It Cheaper Gina! I love your floors. I suggested it to my husband since we have concrete under our carpet but he wasn't so thrilled:-) Oh well, someday I'll have something different than carpet!

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  21. We had painted concrete floors in one of our houses and I liked it too. Makes cleaning easy!
    -FringeGirl

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  22. Love it! We have concrete floors in our "new to us" homes finished basement, unfortunately they are hunter green:( I have been wondering just how hard it would be to repaint! Thanks so much for sharing!

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  23. Oooops! I was already following you. Well, of course I was! :) Pam

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  24. I do like concrete floors for their ease in cleaning and your color choices make them look warmer too. We have old hardwood and a dog with nails (yikes!) so I hear what you're saying. uh oh..... Following you now thru FJSNS. Pam @ Sallygoodin

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  25. it looks great! we've thought about doing that before...we don't have dogs but we do have THREE boys!

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  26. I stained concrete floors in a basement family room we used to have. Staining does work better than painting, paint will chip stain doesn't. I loved them. We had area rugs that helped with the cold floor in the winter.

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  27. Can you tell me exactly what kind of paint you used?

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  28. We used Behr Epoxy concrete floor paint. There are many different kinds of concrete floor paint and many different colors. In high traffic areas, we put a coat of sealer on top of the concrete paint.

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