Week Three. I can’t believe it. Time sure does seem to fly lately! If you are new to House Haus Home (HHH), welcome! If you are returning, thanks for coming back! If you have been following with our One Room Challenge Transformation, we have completed the walls, windows, and are onto the floors. If you haven’t checked out the progress be sure to take a peek at week one and two.

If you saw my stories last week, I shared our new plan for flooring. Originally we had planned to do a polished concrete slab….then we planned on tiling. As always, we seems to run into issues with contractors either not showing up or showing up and then never sending a quote (WHY ?!?!) I did get one quote from a really nice man who I may use for another project but life happened and we decided not to move forward with the tile.

As many of you know, we have been working through some fertility challenges for over a year. Long story short, we were about to start IVF when our insurance company (our plan does cover IVF) caused a giant hiccup and that is still not resolved. We may have to pay for all the fertility drugs out of pocket (goodbye money) so I needed to reserve our tile fund for baby making and look for an alternative.

I was in bed and couldn’t sleep and was playing on good ole instagram when I was watching a story by the amazing artist William McClure. William is not only known for his beautiful works of art, but also creating clean and organic interiors. His signature white floors always looks beautiful but when I watched the transformation of the flooring in his new home, a lightbulb went off. Why not just paint them?

I was initially hesitant to paint them given we have four dogs, but after some research, I saw many pet owners have white painted floors. Yes, this could be disastrous, but it’s just paint. I came across a tutorial by Vintage Revivals and used it as guidance. She recommends a top coat for easier cleaning so I researched this and it appears to be a product with great reviews.

The process was pretty easy for us. Once the tile was removed (nice use of an entire weekend), we cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. Did I mention we cleaned? When we thought we were done cleaning, we cleaned some more.

Our base floors were not perfect. There were some hairline cracks and dings. I used this product that I picked up from Lowes and basically patched it exactly like you would patch a hole in the wall. It’s self leveling and really easy to use. If you have a deeper hole, you can fill it with sand first or add multiple layers of this product. The instructions on the bottle were pretty easy to follow.

One all the holes were patched, I vacuumed a few more times and then the painting began. Painting is the DIY home task I despise the most. I put on some jams and started the floors exactly like I would a wall-cutting in. Since I still had to touch up the last two inches of brick, I wasn’t overly concerned with it being perfect. Once that was done, I literally poured paint on the floor in sections and painted myself out the door. SW recommends waiting 4 hours between coats, but I waited 24 hours.

In all, I painted three coats of paint on the floor. I used our Dyson cordless very gently each day I painted a new coat to minimize any debris that would be carried in with my clothes.

After the paint had cured, it was time for the top coat…….that is when everything when my hard work went down the drain. DO NOT USE A TOP COAT OVER THE SHERWIN WILLIAMS PORCH PAINT.

If you follow my stories, I shared that the porch paint and top coat had a chemical reaction causing both a ripple effect and cracking (remember that 90s faux finish? Barf.) I called my local SW store and the manager had major concerns that one of her staff advised me to use it. I shared with her where I got the information and she was like “umm no”. Maybe it works for some people-it definitely didn’t work for us.

After a ton of sanding and re-cleaning, I added one more coat. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. It definitely helped but the only way to have gotten it perfect was to chemically remove the finish. Since I was putting a larger rug down, I decided that we can accept the imperfections as it is part of our ORC story.

In any event, this was the week one of the tedious weeks but I am excited because now that the floors are done, the fun part can start! Thank you to Linda from Calling It Home and Media Sponsor, Better Homes and Garden for this event. Be sure to check out what the other guest participants are up to over on the ORC Blog!