The Floor Up - Concrete Floor!

• Take the time to think about how the space looks now and how you want it to look.
• Sketch or draw out your vision so you have a drawing or mental model to follow.
• I started with my floor so I knew I had to totally clear my space first before I could work on the entire area.
• Make a plan to clear your space.
• Clear your space
• Cut the carpet and roll it up to remove
• Use the back part, nail puller, part of a hammer to pry up carpet tack strips around the wall.
• See if your concrete is suitable for staining. I had a lot of loose or uneven overlay type concrete that I chipped out by hand using a scraper. I thought it would give me a better final floor when I was finished.

I knew it would be a lot of work, and it was! I took a day and just cleared out my entire room. I rearranged the living room to be half the size it normally is and just stacked up my furniture and stuff. I had a spare bedroom to move into while I worked on my bedroom. Since I didn't want to work all alone, my best friend, Petey, was there with me every step of the way. He makes a great supervisor! It was very hard to get the carpet out. My son helped me. We used a razor knife and cut several long cuts in it and just rolled it up and took it to the curb. The trash men picked it up. That took a long time and that old carpet was heavy and stinky. When the carpet was out it looked like piles of sand left on the concrete. That was the moment I knew I would never carpet any of my spaces again.

I knew I wanted my new bedroom to begin with a cool floor and nothing is cooler to me than stained concrete. After I cleared the room and removed the carpet I had to evaluate the surface of my floor. I had some very uneven spots that would not have looked right so I hand scraped that concrete material up. I think it may have been a leveling agent at one time but for me it was bumpy, ugly, and in the way. I cleaned the floor and used a citric acid solution that would get my concrete ready to receive the stain.

I prepped the floor and used the citric acid wash to get my floor ready to accept the stain.

I used two different stain colors. One was a light to medium shade of red and one was a mahogany, reddish, brown color. I then used a tan color to accent some of the floor but mostly I used the red shades. All supplies can be purchased at any home and garden type store. I bought mine at Lowes.

I prefer the "wet on wet" method. I used a spray pump bottle like they use to spray insecticide (available at any hardware store) and I pumped up each bottle to build the pressure and I used one and then the other overlapping so that the stain colors were both applied at the same time and kind of ran together making a nice effect and color that I really liked. The first layer of stain was only the red the second layer was when I started the "wet on wet" two stain color application. After I had most of my reddish colors sprayed I used a third spray pump bottle and sprayed the tannish color in random spots to blend in with the reddish tones. The fun thing about stain is you can't do it wrong. You stain it the way you want it and when the colors run together they look really nice.

Let it dry, do another coat. Do another if you want to after that. I did a final clear coat and added a slightly gritty additive to the final top clear coat so that the floor would not be slippery, especially in the bathroom. It works great!

The floors were complete and they looked nice so that made my walls look really bad. The next step was to paint the walls, especially while the room was still cleared out.

• Go back to the vision you sketched or imagined in your mind and think about the colors you want to use.
• Think about how you want to feel in this space and what type of paint, flooring, window treatments, furniture, etc...will take you there.
• Each time you finish one part of your project take a minute to slow down and go back to the beginning plan and make sure you are going in the direction you planned. You don't want to be unhappy when you are finished and you don't want to have to do it over right away! Planning is well worth the time!

I painted the walls and installed new mini blinds. My windows are tall (72 inches) and skinny and I knew I wanted to buy a certain curtain so I didn't spend much money on mini blinds. I bought the cheapest ones I could find at Wal Mart and they still seem to do the job just fine. I wanted to make sure my colors would all come together to give me the feel I wanted so I considered my bedding and curtains as I selected the wall color.

I did not paint my ceiling but may in the future. I may try a stencil pattern or to paint a pattern but for now I left it white.

I topped off my room with a new ceiling fan fixture.

I did not have a headboard that I wanted to use so I bought some cheap used doors from Craigslist and my son and I constructed a headboard that is permanently affixed to my bedroom wall. We imagined how it should be and we cut, glued, nailed, screwed, and painted until the headboard fit the room. After the headboard pictures were taken I did add another coat of paint and a top coat of polyurethane so the headboard now looks a little different than it does in these pictures.

One tip is to consider your ceiling height. My bedroom ceiling is 10 feet tall so I decided to maximize my wall space and hang my new curtains from well above my window to add height to the overall feeling of the room. I like how that look turned out!

Taking the time to re-do your entire bedroom from the floor to the light fixture takes a lot of time and is a lot of work but it is very much worth it! We didn't even talk about the master bedroom closet or bathroom/vanity area....maybe in another instructable! Thank you and happy decorating and creating!