Brand New Basement

The next house project was to clean up the laundry room area of the basement. The plan was to paint the floors and walls so that we could comfortably turn some of the area into storage. This part of the basement probably hasn't been cleaned in the lifetime of the house, so needless to say it needed some elbow grease to clean up.

Here are some "before" pictures. Just to warn you, it's not pretty. Whenever we dropped a piece of laundry on the floor, we wanted to re-wash it.
I guess the old oil furnace was to the left in this picture. I couldn't wait to get rid of these kiddie hand paint art pieces on the right.

The walls have been cleaned in these two photos.


Farley comes to visit.
Now we prepare for the acid etching of the floor concrete. The acid is a pretty nasty product to use, and you need to be fully protected for obvious reasons.

The respirator worked great. I took it off once because I was getting hot, but put it back on once I smelled the fumes. After the acid is applied, it's scrubbed in with a broom and sits for 20 minutes. Then it's rinsed off with water. We fed the hose into the basement, and the floors were rinsed 4-5 times. The water was removed with a shop vac.

As you can see, the floor looks almost brand new after the acid treatment.

There were some stains left - such as what appears to be wood stain and rust marks.
Now we're ready to paint. We used basement waterproofing paint (white) for the walls, and a grey floor paint.

It feels great to paint over these hand prints!

A couple coats later, and the walls are finished! It was almost painting with spackle - this stuff was really thick.

We've had dozens of uninvited residents to our basement - rolly polly's.


Cendy gets us started the floor painted started with some edging.Call me jelly, because I'm on a roll...

We plan it out so we don't paint ourselves into a corner.And about an hour and one coat later, we're done!