Painting the kitchen floors.

Get pumped. I’ve finally written the first floor post. I know you’ve been checking your computer every other minute in anticipation…right? We’re still not quite finished with ‘em, but at least it’ll get ya caught up. ;)

Remember our faux brick flooring in the kitchen? Let me refresh your memory.

We knew we wanted to update it just a smidge {sense the sarcasm}, but our big purchases of the new windows & basement fix, we’re looking to minimize the spending. My solution? Paint the floor.

I saw examples all over Pinterest, but I took my own slightly different way {big surprise.} I painted behind the appliances first so as to not scrape the floor by moving them often.

Eugene & I first cleaned it really well. But it still looked dirty which was another motivating factor for painting the floor. Our next step was to lightly sand the floor, but it really didn’t make much of a difference honestly. Then we used our same go-to primer that we used to paint our bathroom tile: Zinsser Oil Based primer.

We just trimmed the edges with a brush & rolled the center area of the floor.

After one coat of primer and 24 hours to dry well, the next step was our paint. Using some other blogs’ recommendations, we went with a Porch & Floor paint. Glidden “Fossil Grey” was our choice of color.

The paint was pretty smelly & thinner than normal wall paint, but it covered well and seemed to adhere well to the primer. So far, so good.

We did two coats of the Fossil Grey with plenty of drying time between. Oh, and meanwhile, we’ve been eating dinner in the living room surrounded by piles of stuff. That’s convenient. At least we have two roses to make dinner romantic.

I digress. Okay, the next step was to stencil the design. I used a stencil I purchased for around $3 at my newest favorite fabric store, Hancock, where I purchased the fabric for our kitchen curtains. All the other stencils I looked at online were well over $40. Needless to say, I was a tad excited to find this much less expensive stencil. I picked up some stencil brushes at JoAnn’s for $0.99.

Here’s the stencil in detail…

From there it was just tape, dab, clean off the stencil occasionally and work from there. I lucked out and could use the indents from the bricks that showed through as my grid to align the pattern. I also had decided early on that I wanted an imperfect, aged look for the design, so I wasn’t shooting for perfectly crisp edges by any means.

PS the colors in all these pictures are off. I guess since I did it late at night, and early in the morning, the white balance is all thrown off. Plus the windows in the room are all shaded by trees, so I don’t get much natural light. The picture below is pretty true to color.

After at least eight long hours of stamping the stencil, lots of pandora music, and a marathon of 24 episodes, I finally finished all the stenciling. This brings us to what the kitchen looks like today.

We still have lots of poly to coat it with, but I think even before the shiny covering it already looks better. The color is slightly more tan and less gray than I anticipated, so I’m a bit worried that it all just blends in together with the white cabinets. I think once we have the bright green backsplash & butcher block counters it will look really nice. At the very least it blends much better than the faux brick with the kitchen changes we’ve made. It helps to remember that this is likely only a temporary fix for the flooring. So…whatcha think?

For all you cost nerds out there, here’s my rough break down.

Primer – $0 {already had, but it’s around $18 in the store}
Stencil – $3
Stencil brush – $1
Floor paint – $25
Poly Sealer – $45 {not used yet, but will be in a post coming soon. I hope.}
White paint – $0 {already had, but it’s around $25 in the store, but didn’t use more than a cup full}

That brings me to a grand total of under $75 for the whole kit & caboodle, but I still have money as a credit to Home Depot from the fence items we returned, so it was only $4.00 out of pocket costs. I can handle that!

I’ll be sure to post the official “after” pictures once we get the poly finished, so stay tuned.

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