Our weekend project

After only 2 years in our house our carpet was already showing alot of wear so we decided to do something else to the floor. We decided to stain the concrete because that was all we could do without going into debt. So Friday night, we moved all of the furniture into the dining room, breakfast nook and kitchen.

Then we pulled up all the carpet.

Then we began the unenviable task of cleaning the concrete--scraping all the paint, spackle and carpet glue that had been left behind. This took until well after midnight (Tim gave up well before that, but my type A personality stuck it out). We got up bright and early the next morning and began again--sweeping, mopping, wetting it down and wet-vacing up the water.

Saturday night after Makenzie went to bed, we donned rubber gloves, old clothes and rubber-soled shoes to apply the etching stain. Tim didn't read the directions (shocker!!) and so we wasted a whole day letting it dry before we stained it when the directions said it needed to be wet! This is what it looked like the next morning after the salts precipitated out.
Then came another day of neutralizing with baking soda, vaccuuming up the water and rinse/repeat over and over again.

Sunday evening we applied the epoxy and let it dry.

You can see right in front of the fireplace the area where someone told me I didn't need to worry about cleaning up the glue anymore--he would scrape it off and it would be fine. But the residue didn't take the stain so it's pretty obvious (at least to me).

We finally were able to move the furniture back in this evening, although it probably would have been best to wait another 24 hours because we scuffed it a little moving things around.

I'm really happy with it overall--I think it goes well with our "old world" decor, but we'll probably end up adding another epoxy coat at some point.