How to Paint Your Floor

I totally love the floor in my office. I can't believe I did something that came out looking like that. The Jazzman deserves 90% of the credit, as he did all the prep work, after I sanded the floor, and applied the polyurethane after I did the faux finish.

More than that, as I was asphyxiating myself with the glaze, he realized what was happening and saved me from death-by-chemicals—and from myself!

I got this idea on an episode of Trading Spaces that was shot in Orlando, where one couple painted the other couple's nasty old flooring.

Here's my nasty old flooring. This is the bathroom floor. The flooring in the office was the same pattern, but in a 1930s or 1940s blue-green that was stained, tired, and needed to go buh-bye.

I sanded, then deglossed the vinyl. The Jazzman taped the trim, laid down two or three coats of primer, then a couple of base coats of beige. Then I was going to sponge a taupe glaze. I had bought a cool sponge-on-a-mitt, but couldn't figure out how to make it work. I remembered when I ragged off the glaze on Boston's nursery with Jaci nine years ago, and started doing a similar process on the wet glaze. When that dried, I touched up a few places, then Jazzman applied two coats of polyurethane and touched up the trim. What's not obvious is 24-48-72 hours curing after each coat. So the whole process took several weeks, but is totally and completely worth every bit of effort.

If you're thinking you'd like to do the same thing to one of your floors, here's the process on eHow.com.

Here's another scene of the final result.