Different Flooring Options

Its been a little while because: we bought a house!

It was a short sale, so of course that means it was a long process and I'm just so glad to be done with it! Meanwhile, we've been installing and upgrading and redoing as many things as we can! One of the projects I worked on last week was my boys' room. Here's some pictures of the process:

I started painting at night so thats why this is so dark, but this is the "before"--which means, turquoise. Turquoise walls, baseboards, even the window sills. Sheesh, it was a lot of turquoise! :)

Here it is with the white on the bottom. It took at LEAST three coats of a paint/primer in one to cover it. In fact, I used the entire gallon of paint on this room!

The top part got two coats of a navy blue, and then the carpets were pulled out. Did you notice them in the other pictures? They were blue. A very 80's blue. And gross. So glad to have them gone!

 So we're down to the subfloor. Which is just plywood. My original plan was just to paint the plywood. When I pulled back the carpet, guess what I found?! A whole bunch of overspray from the wall texture on all the edges of the floor! Isn't that just lovely?! So pulled the carpet out, removed the tack strips and all the staples (this took a long time!). Right now would be a good time to check for squeaks. If you step down and its squeaks, put a screw in there.

 This is the doorway, you can see a little bit of the overspray but also a nice wire coming out of the middle of the floor! Another not expected surprise! At that point, I thought I wouldn't be able to use the subfloor and went out and bought MDF to cover the whole thing. Later I checked out that wire--yeah, it was cut and didn't lead to anything. So I COULD have pulled the wire out, patched the whole and used the subfloor as is. BUT, then I would have had to sand all the overspray off, pull off all the baseboards and re-attach them 1/2 an inch lower. I also like the thought of having a little bit thicker floor, just seems sturdier to me!

So I went out and bought four sheets of MDF. Now, here's my disclaimer: this probably isn't the best choice for flooring. It would probably be better to get plywood at the very least (I've seen tutorials about painting plywood floors, like here or here). I was on a super tight budget and just trying to make things work. In a couple months I'll let you know how well its held up ok? :) So the sheets come in 4 ft by 8 ft, and I had the guy at Lowe's cut them in 4 ft by 2 ft planks. After I got them home I laid them out and had to make some extra cuts. It was actually kind of fun, like putting a puzzle together! Then after I had them all laid out, I nailed them all down. Probably would be a better idea to screw them down, but I'm gonna be honest, I'm kind of lazy. :) (And yes, I did hit my thumb at least twice--ouch!)

The boards didn't fit in 100% tight, so I had to fill in a couple small gaps--either my boards weren't totally straight or the walls aren't. :)

After that I painted on a layer of primer, and then a layer of white porch paint. Here's my tip for painting floors: don't use white. I've already noticed as soon as you step on it theres a foot print. They will be much harder to keep clean!

So then I painted on navy stripes. I wanted to do this the whole time and thought it would add such a fun detail to the room. I'm going for a nautical theme and it just seemed perfect. This also helps with the dirty factor, footprints don't show up on the navy! So I did two coats of the navy and two coats of the white porch paint.

And this is what happens when you're too liberal with your paint-- it bleeds under your tape. Another tip: if you're a sloppy painter, don't do stripes! haha In all honesty, you do need to be careful when you want a nice line, putting on too much paint is going to cause things to bleed and then you'll have to go through and touch it all up again. Also if you notice, my tape pulled up some of the paint--thats why you wait until your paint has COMPLETELY dried before you put tape on it! :)

So that is the tale of the boys' room floors! Hopefully it will give you some ideas if you are on a tight budget of what you can do! I will be posting a complete finished look soon but I still need to hang pictures and finish up last touches! Look forward to it!