Studio Floor Progress — On The Home Stretch!

Since I wasn’t able to completely clear out the studio and do the entire floor at one time, I’ve had to do the painted floor project in stages, which has made it a bit more challenging than it should have been. But that’s okay! I’m making it work. As I showed you last week, I got about 2/3 of the floor in the main room finished…

So before I could start on the other sections, I covered this part of the floor with paper…

The paint that I used is incredibly durable, so I wasn’t worries about rolling my tables onto this part of the floor. In fact, I’ve already had to roll the tables onto the painted floor twice. But I wanted to cover it so that it wouldn’t get all dusty from the sanding I had to do in the rest of the room. This section is all neat and clean, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Once I had it covered, I moved everything over to this side of the room to start on the back areas.

I got the rest of the main room sanded using my hand held belt sander and 80-grit sandpaper…

There are several reasons I didn’t rent a floor sander for this project:

1. I knew this project would span several days, including some days (like Wednesdays and Sundays) when I wouldn’t be able to work at all, so renting a sander for the duration of the project would have cost a fortune.
2. Floor sanders are very powerful and would have taken off too much from the floor. I just needed the surface roughed up a bit. I didn’t need all of the paint and stain removed.
3. A big floor sander would have been less than useless in the small areas like the storage closet and the bathroom, and it would have been difficult to maneuver in the small back entry as well. So I’d have to do those areas with a hand sander anyway.

After weighing the pros and cons of renting a floor sander, I decided to just stick with my hand held belt sander. It’s a happy medium between a floor sander and a little 5-inch random orbit sander, like one that you might use to sand a table top. The belt sander is very powerful, so it gets the job done. The down side is that I have to be down on my knees to sand the floor. That a definite “pro” to the floor sander. You stand up to use a floor sander. But to me, being on my knees to sand the floor was a small price to pay for avoiding the hassle of a big floor sander and avoiding the cost of rental for over a week.

I still have to sand the back entry, which is the one area that has already been painted. But again, I don’t need to remove all of the paint. I just need to get rid of any ridges where the design was taped off and painted, and where the painted “rug” meets the whitewashed floor.

Sanding the bathroom floor will be the hardest part simply because I’ll need to move the toilet and the vanity out of the room completely. That’s going to be a real pain, but it has to be done.

But it’s getting there! I’m hoping that by the end of the day today, I’ll have the entire floor sanded, vacuumed, cleaned, and primed. If things go perfectly, maybe I can even paint it, but that might be pushing it.

As a side note, I’m very excited about giving this bathroom a little makeover. I’m going to change the walls, the tile, and the vanity color.

I don’t have my plans completely nailed down just yet simply because whatever I do in this bathroom depends on what I do in the back entry. I need to decide on that first, and then make plans for the bathroom. But the vanity color needs to change because I have a feeling it’ll be too close to (but not quite the same as) the color that I’ll be using on the studio cabinets. They’ll be similar but off just enough so that it’ll look like a mistake rather than a coordinated decision.

Speaking of the back entry, I do think I’ve made a decision on that. I am going to use the wallpaper in that area, but as of right now, I plan to wallpaper the upper walls and do wainscoting on the lower walls. I think that’ll give them enough pattern and color, while keeping them from looking too busy (for me). They’ll be just busy enough. 😀

I’ve also decided to keep the blue ceiling in the main room. I love the idea of a flower garden on the main wall and a ceiling the color of the sky. But the walls will still be white. So I just played around with the idea of bringing that blue into the back entry. That’s not a firm decision yet. I just wanted to see what it might look like.