Cottage Floor

 
T.J. and I decided we were sick of the carpet that came with our house. We have been saving up for dark wood laminate, but are not quite ready to take the plunge. Right about the same time we reached our limit on the ugly carpet, a few of my favorite blogs to read and a recent House Beautiful magazine featured painted sub-floor. Check out one of them here. While it is definitely only a temporary solution, it is growing on me. T.J. digs it.

Before - with carpet

We started by ripping up all the old carpet and padding. T.J. went around and pried up all the tack strips and staples left behind in the wood.

What we found was quite a mess - mostly because previous owners must have painted the walls with bare sub-floor showing and freely splattered paint everywhere. We had considered staining the sub-floor before we found out what was under there. I thought it was so bad we had better just move up the date we were going to buy the laminate and put that down instead. T.J. talked me into trying the white paint first (he promised to paint it all himself - worked like a charm). We went to Menards to find some clearance paint and found a gallon of really nice Dutch Boy exterior white for $5. At that price and with T.J. doing all the labor - why not?

Night photo - no furniture in the room.

 T.J. did 1.5 coats - just enough to cover it in white but not enough that it no longer looked rustic. It feels like our bedroom is in a cottage! I kind of like it. It does not flow super well with the rest of the house though - shabby chic is not always my thing. Also - I have read that painted subfloors can be a problem when trying to sell a house - they aren't considered "finished" so even if we did love them, we couldn't keep them forever.

The baseboards are still a mess - waiting for me to put a few coats of bright white on them.

I had to include this shoe picture too - these were my reward for surviving my first year as a Ph.D. student. They are sitting on the one other piece of shabby chic in the whole house - a distressed half table. The new camera captured them beautifully.