The floors are done in the animal rooms!! I’m so happy with the way they came out!
I wasn’t completely sure how I was going to like the design, so I just painted one room at a time. I could tell right away how amazing it was going to look! I was excited to start on the second room. I also painted the walls in the reptile room a light shade of blue to go with the blue on the floor. And I hung light blue curtains in the rooms.
Preparation
Before starting the project, the floors were a stained mess. No matter how much I tried cleaning them, it came to the point where I just couldn’t get them clean. I considered putting rugs down over the mess, but that wouldn’t work. It would drive me crazy knowing what was lurking underneath the rugs. Paint covers everything so I figured that would be the solution to “cleaning” the floors. We’re all friends here, so later in this post I’ll show you pictures of the nasty floors before I painted them!
I started the project by vacuuming and cleaning the floors (again). Then I rolled three coats of white floor paint over the entire surface and let the paint cure for a couple of days.
Painting
I measured out the squares and using FrogTape, I taped out the horizontal and vertical lines. Instead of having all of the blue squares measure 12×12 inches, I wanted some variety so I made them alternate 9×9 inches and 12×12 inches. To help me keep track of the white/blue squares, I put little pieces of tape on the squares that were going to stay white.
I came back later and painted two coats of blue on the squares, using a small paint roller. After letting the final coat of paint dry for about an hour, I removed all of the tape.
I found out the hard way that you can’t put FrogTape on the floors in the morning and come back later to paint. It really can’t stay on surfaces for too long. Six hours was too long in my situation. Apparently, if you go too long, the tape lifts chunks of paint and concrete off the floors. So after taking the tape off, I had to go back and fix some areas.
Once I was done touching up areas that the tape lifted and some spots where I got blue paint on some of the white squares, I erased the pencil lines I made when I was laying out the grid. Then, I let the blue and white paint cure for three days before moving onto the final step of the project.
The clear coat
Since the floors are in the animal rooms, they need to be easy to clean and sanitize. I couldn’t keep them as they were with just a painted matte finish. So I decided to roll on two coats of a glossy clear coat over the paint. The clear coat is designed to be used on garage floors so it should stand up to the animals!
The clear coat dried beautifully. After letting it cure for three days, we moved the animals back into their rooms. It looks and feels so much better in their rooms. The painted concrete looks like vinyl tiles. And, it’s sooooo easy to clean! It sweeps, vacuums, and sanitizes so much easier than the old floor.
The finished project
Two residents of the reptile room have different opinions of the new floors. Max gets angry when he’s trying to run away from Tabitha and he can’t grip the floor to make a mad dash towards the kitchen. Tank loves the floor because he can press his body onto it and slide under the freezer, way out of Tabitha’s reach.
The project involved a lot of small steps, but I’m so happy with it! I wish I would have done this long before now! The new floor makes the other floors in the basement look dingy. Maybe they’ll be my next floor project!
By the way…
One side note about FrogTape. It worked really well for the lines, or grid, in this project. I’ve had problems in the past with getting crisp lines when I used it so I was a little unsure about using it on such a large project. FrogTape has polymers embedded in it. The polymers are activated by the water in latex paint. In order to get crisp lines, after you put the tape on whatever you’re going to paint, you can lightly wet the surface of the tape with water to activate the polymers and create a barrier along the edge of the tape. Even though I knew about wetting the tape before painting, I gambled and skipped wetting it because 1) I didn’t want to take the time to wet it (I tend to get impatient with projects), and 2) I figured if it really turned out bad with blurred lines, I’d just say it was my artistic take on a checkerboard floor and that I meant to do it that way! When I painted the blue squares, I went square-by-square and carefully painted the edges of each square first. Then I filled in the outline. This allowed the paint to wet the tape for a few seconds to activate the polymers and seal the edges. There were only a few spots that didn’t get a good seal. And they were easy to touch up with a small brush. Looking back, it probably didn’t save any time skipping the wetting process because I had to be extra careful painting the edges to create the seal with paint. But, at the time, I felt like it saved a step so I was happy to skip it!
