Don’t you just love home improvement shows? I do, I am a sucker for makeover shows!
However, once you are actually living in a fixer upper and doing the work yourself.. you quickly learn that your reality might look a little different than your favorite reality shows.. right!? 
We’ve been in our current fixer for about 2 1/2 years. It has been quite the process and I am continuing to learn how to embrace it and be ok in the messy middle.
There is definitely something gratifying about completing a project yourself.. about working on a budget and coming up with creative solutions ( i mean if someone offered to do the work for me or fund my project i wouldn’t argue. lol).
A year ago today we posted a Kitchen Edition and showed our progress.
So here we are again.. this time tackling the floor! Our kitchen, hallways and bathrooms are covered in some not so attractive linoleum & since we had also recently moved our frigde & took out our peninsula (blog post to come) we had some exposed concrete and some major eye sores on floor. Since we are not able to replace our floors at this time and my eyes could no longer lay sight on those floors … we decided that just about anything would be an improvement.. so obviously I headed to Pinterest for some inspiration… check out these transformations here and here!
There seem to be many different methods to painting floors but here’s a glimpse of what we did.
here is our starting point… you can see where the previous peninsula had been and where the refrigerator had been.
Step #1 – clean the floor. After sweeping & mopping. I used a heavy duty cleaner that helps to de-gloss and degrease the floor. Purchased from Lowe’s – TSP
Step #2 – Prime Floor using Killz primer
Step #3 – Painted Base Coat of paint- 2 coats of paint. We opted to use Valspar Floor & Porch Paint – White
Step #4 – Stencil and stencil and stencil. I’m not gonna lie… this part was a true labor of love.. it took several multiple hour sessions. We considered just painting it a solid color, which would have cut the work time in more than half, but nah why take the easy route!? LOL.
A few tips regarding stenciling:
-use a foam roller. I bought mine from Hobby Lobby.
-use limited paint on the roller and roll lightly over the stencil. (too much paint/pressure will cause excessive bleeding under stencil lines)
- clean your stencil from time to time, otherwise the caked on paint will cause your stencil to loose it’s original design.
- if you are a perfectionist this might not be your gig. Haha.
Until Next time!!
XOXO
Our true starting point. (always good to remember where you started and celebrate your progress!)
