Materials and the sequence of the job sit together on this page.
Hello Bekob! There are no words for how excited I am to be contributing to Bekob! I am Tasha and I blog over at Designer Trapped in a Lawyer’s Body. You may remember my first contributor post about how to transform an outdated, cultured marble vanity with concrete. I am so happy to be back again this month to share another thrifty, high impact design option with you!
My blog focuses on thrifty Handmade renovations and I am here to share with you one of my go-to Handmade projects that I have ever tackled! I have seen many creative ways to address damaged or outdated floors, like here and here on Bekob. My go-to way to update an outdated or damaged floor on a tiny modest-cost is to use PAINT! There have been some fabulous painted floors shared here on Bekob, like here and here. You may have even seen how I painted my ugly vinyl laundry room floors over here on Bekob when I guest posted about my high style, low cost laundry room renovation.
Well, we LOVE our painted laundry room floors so, so much and they are holding up so well {perfectly, in fact}, that when it came to deciding how to update our badly damaged bamboo floors in our kitchen, we knew we wanted to paint them. Not only do we love the look of painted floors, but we simply did not have the modest-cost to refinish our floors {nor did we really love the bamboo flooring anyway}.
So, we quickly decided to paint our kitchen floors, but this time, we decided to take it up a notch by stenciling it! And today, I am going to provide you with a detailed walkthrough of how we did it so you can do it yourself.
How to: Painted and Stenciled Floor
This post contains some affiliate links for your convenience. Click here to read our full disclosure policy.
Materials Needed:
- Trisodium phosphate {TSP}
- Paint brush
- Porch and floor paint in two different colors {it MUST BE porch and floor paint}
- Latex primer
- Large paint roller frame, roller and extension rod
- Small paint roller frame and dense foam roller
- Paint trays {one large, one small}
- Stencil of your choosing
- Paper towels
- Card board
- A whole, whole, whole lot of patience
Steps:
1) Prepare the surface I cannot over emphasize the importance of this step. You must thoroughly clean your floor. We used TSP and mixed it according to the directions. We literally scrubbed the floors on our hands and knees and then hand dried them. I think rushing this step could compromise the whole project, so take your time and do it right.
2) Prime the entire floor Using your large roller and extension rod, prime the entire floor. You will need to use a paint brush to cut in along the base boards. We allowed the primer to dry overnight.
3) Paint the entire floor with your base color Again, using your large paint roller, you need to paint the entire floor with your base color. Double coat if necessary. Again, we allowed the base coat to dry overnight.
4) Stencil your floor This is the fun part, but I am NOT going to lie… it is time consuming. It was not difficult, it just took a long time. I highly recommend listening to an audiobook while you work. That’s what I did I used the Hollywood Squares stencil by Royal Design Studio. I LOVE the modern, contemporary look of it, but you can absolutely choose a more traditional stencil depending upon your own personal style!
We started by taping off the perimeter of our room with 1 inch painter’s tape. This was a personal choice. You can run your stencil all the way up to your baseboards if you choose.
Next, gather your supplies. You need your small, dense foam roller, paper towels and a piece of cardboard. Plus, of course, you need your secondary paint color in a small paint tray. You need the paper towels because you want to work with an almost totally dry roller–this will help prevent the paint from bleeding under your stencil. Every time you add paint to your roller, be sure to roll it over the paper towels to remove most of the paint.
Because you will be working with a mostly dry brush, you will make two over the stencil each and every time you reposition the stencil. After the first pass, you will have poor coverage. After the second pass, you will be in good shape.
After you have good coverage, carefully lift and move your stencil to the next spot. Be sure to line it up using either the registration marks on the stencil. Or, you can do what I did, which was to line it up using the stencil pattern itself {because I kept getting paint on my registration marks and they were hard to see!}. Repeat over and over again until your entire floor is covered.
I stenciled the perimeter edges last, because that is the most tedious work. To see how to position your stencil when working around the perimeter of cabinets or appliances, look at the photo below.
Time Spent and Cost:
You can complete this project for around $100, depending upon the size of your room. The stencil I chose retails for $45 and the paint we purchased at Lowe’s is $27 per gallon–we used two gallons {one of each color}.
I didn’t time myself, but I believe it took me around 5 hours to stencil the floor, plus another 2 hours or so to prep, prime and paint the floor with the base coat. So, again, it is a time consuming project, but it is one of my go-to projects of all time, so was 7 hours WELL spent! look at the strong result.
Tips and Observations:
I am sure some people may disagree with this tip, but I recommend working from left to right to complete and entire row BEFORE beginning your next row. Think of it like reading a book. Left to right, then on to the next line.
I will also say that I have never encountered a room that is perfectly square, and our kitchen was no exception. With a geometric stencil, there will almost certainly be one corner of your room where the stencil does not line up perfectly with the perimeter of your room. For us, we planned to end our stenciling in the eat-in area of our kitchen, knowing that the stencil wouldn’t line up perfectly in that corner, but that our kitchen table would essentially hide it. As it worked out, the stencil is off by about 1/4 of an inch in that corner, which is very minor and not noticeable at all with our kitchen table and chairs in place. We are perfectly happy with that solution, but if you don’t want to see ANY imperfections, a geometric stencil may not be your best option.
Finally, IT IS NOT NECESSARY NOR DO I RECOMMEND adding a polyurethane finish on top of it. There is a very long story behind this that I will share at some point on my blog, but take my word for it. We finished painting our kitchen floors in April and they are holding up better than I ever could have expected. And our kitchen gets HEAVY use by us, our twin girls and our 90 pound Boxer. So far, we have no scratches or peeling. We do have some black marks from our shoes, but those wipe off with a magic eraser. In short, porch and floor paint is made for floors and should hold up well without any additional protective coat on top of it. That has certainly been our experience {in our kitchen AND our laundry room}.
We LOVE the end result.
I would love for you to head over to my blog, Designer Trapped in a Lawyer’s Body, to explore some of our other thrifty renovation projects, like how we totally transformed our kitchen for less than $700. You may also want to see our final powder room reveal, which includes the Handmade concrete vanity that you saw in my last contributor post. And if you love a stylish light fixture, you won’t want to miss how I made a Handmade bentwood pendant light for a fraction of the price of the designer origina l! I hope to see you over in my corner of blog land soon!
————————————–
More Handmade modest-cost-friendly ways to update a tired floor:
