New floor!

We're going to try an experiment in night training. K has been telling us that she pees in her diaper in the morning, so I thought with pull ups and a potty in her room, we could see if she was able to stay dry at night. We've been talking it up this weekend, and we'll try as soon as I can get to the store for pull ups.

We're also encouraging more potty independece at home with a couple of M+Ms for taking care of things herself. I'm a little tired of being summoned to watch her pee, when I know she's going alone at school. Last night she willingly forfeited them though, because, to quote, "Jeans are too hard to pull up and down, up and down, up and down, whoa-oh-oh."

(Name that 80s pop song!)

On to the floor...

So after Christmas, I ripped the carpet out of the back bedroom, and we started experimenting on the floor for how we were going to stain/paint the concrete. First we needed to get it as clean as possible, and it's had carpet on it for 40 years. We tried Goof-off, a petroleum based solvent, and the fumes were just too too much. So then I spent $50 on a gallon of hippie no-VOC cleaner/stripper and it didn't do anything. So we tried some cheap stuff, and wonder of wonders, hot-hot water and oxyclean does the best, even for loosening the old paint and glue so it can be scraped up.

After a lot of off and on work (mostly off), I tried a test patch of the paint a few weeks ago, and it was way too opaque. After looking at a bunch of photos online, I decided to thin the semi-transparent water based stain to 1 part stain 3 parts water. We did the first coat last night, and I really like it. The way the water moves through the pigment as it dries creates a really cool naturalistic look. Some parts it dried to a crackle finish, in other places it looks like little tiny waves in the paint. It isn't quite covering enough of the flaws, so we're going to do another coat, and I hope it stays as dynamic.

There was one moment of semi-panic, because there was this milky blue look to the puddles as it was starting to dry. My husband thought it was gunk coming up and that we needed to clean the floor more, I thought it was the combo of the solvents evaporating and the water, and I was right. No hint of anything once it's dry.

We'll do the second coat tonight, and then the sealer, and then the wax coat. I'll take some photos tomorrow after the second coat dries. I'm not looking forward to the sealer (very smelly, though it dries quickly) and considered just using the wax, but if we ever had to completely strip the wax, the finish would probably be ruined if it wasn't sealed.

Once this room is done, we move on to the rest of the house! I have an internal goal of having it all done by next Christmas, but I'm not sure if Theo will agree that's reasonable. Not sure if we want to keep moving down that hallway and do our bedrooms next or go to the other end of the house and do the playroom next. The playroom would be the least disruptive to our life, for sure. We're going to have to figure out how we're going to do our room, as the bed was assembled once it was inside!