The Amazing Adventures of Tom and Bel

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

She's (still) Crafty

Law School (notice the capital letters?) is insane. It's good, it's challenging, but knitting time has been seriously curtailed. If I get a row done, it's a very, very good week.
So instead, I sneaked in this project:


I had the little deviants (er, darling children) rip out the old peel & stick:
and then tear up a bunch of paper bags from our local grocery stores:

Didn't count, but I'd guess we used ~30 bags.

At first I painted front and back of each paper sections, but when Z started to 'help':

I made it easier on us both by crumpling the sections of bag and dipping them in the watered-down glue. Much faster and had more texture, so I was happy.
Note: My floor had a combination of what appeared to be self-leveling compound and plywood underlayment, but I didn't worry about it and just papered right over it.


I let that dry for a day and a half, then I stained it with some cheesecloth and a tube of Minwax Express Color in mahogany.
[I was cheap, er, frugal and only bought one tube ($6.50) b/c our bathroom's not that big (abt 55 sq ft). Right now there's just the teensiest bit of stain left in the tube. If I were going to do it again, I'd buy a can of stain and hold on it for touch ups.]
Then I polyurethaned it many, many times.


When you're sick of this floor, to the best of my knowledge you can just do a new underlayment and then whatever your new choice of top layer is.

Here's some tips & good images if you want to try it:
http://www.yankeemagazine.com/issues/20 ... e/flooring
http://groceryshrink.com/2010/05/illust ... loors.html
http://www.anoregoncottage.com/2010/08/ ... loors.html (the video is quite helpful)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... s=287x5019
http://texasfishingforum.com/forums/ubb ... 80/gonew/1


I was lazy and didn't take out the fixtures (horrors!) but I figure as a temporary (2-5 year) treatment, I'm not gonna worry too much about it. If it gets holes, you can just patch with another piece of bag and polyurethane.

I really like it, esp. b/c technically it means we now have a wood floor in that room.

Labels: ,