New Sewing Room...

...coming soon.

I have 2 small rooms devoted to my sewing/knitting/crafts. One is where I have my sewing machines set up to sew and the other is where I have my cutting table and ironing board & iron. If the rooms were located side-by-side, which they are not, I would have  knocked down a wall and made one large room. Unfortunately, one room is located right across from the other room, so rather than cram everything into one room, which would leave me no where to sit or stand or walk or be able to do anything, it is divided into 2 rooms. The upside to this is I have to get up from sewing to cut or iron and at least get moving more, as it is better to move around and not sit in one place too long, right?

Both rooms were carpeted, and the carpet in the sewing room was looking a bit shabby, so my sweet husband offered to put in a new floor for me. The house is on a cement slab and we have both always wanted to stain a cement floor as we have seen some beautiful floors done this way. Ron researched about doing this, but the real test was to rip up the carpeting and see what actually lurked beneath. The cement was in good shape, however in order to apply a semi-transparent stain (our 1st choice) to the cement floor, it has to be completely free of any paint. The stain reacts with the cement and penetrates to allow the pretty colors to show through. There of course was overspray of paint from the walls when the house was built and the bright pink paint under each outlet for the electrician to know where the outlets are located. Ron had to apply paint remover and scrap and scrap off the old paint. Then there was the cement patching that needed to be done because the carpet tack strip left small holes all around the room.

So as Ron got into doing this work and reading more about it online, he discovered that unless the cement floor is pretty much pristine (like in newly poured and never had a carpet on it before) the semi-transparent stain would show every blotch and imperfection. He read all kinds of stories about it and then decided we should paint the floor with a cement opaque paint, that would cover it all, but we wouldn't get the beauty of the transparent floor. Boo-hoo, I really like that transparent look.

Ron went to Home Depot yesterday and when he came back he was all hot-to-trot about putting down a wood-look plank flooring. It would look neat and would be easy to do. So I liked that idea. He bought 6 boxes of it. He took a couple of planks out of one box and he set them down on the cement and walked on it to test out how it would feel. It sounded like he was walking on crunchy sand or potato chips! He said we needed to put down an under layer to absorb the sound. We put a small piece of plastic down so he could show me what it would be like. No more crunchy sound. But when he later looked at Lowe's and Home Depot for the under layer, he found it would cost more than the flooring cost (which was a good price). Plus he would need 2 rolls of it as one wasn't quite big enough. So we would get stuck with the rest of it, or if I do the cutting room floor, we would need to buy just one roll and use the rest of the second roll. Depending on the quality of the under layer it would cost from $25.00 per roll up to $60.00 per roll and we would need to purchase 2 rolls so that adds up. The more expensive one was the best in terms of noise reduction and it added a little cushioning too. So our inexpensive flooring job would end up being doubled because we didn't realise we needed an under layer and that it cost so much. Since we hadn't started anything yet, back to the store the flooring went for a refund.

Now back to the painted floor idea again. We would have to get the opaque paint and not the semi-transparent, but we figured this way would be the cheapest and probably the easiest to do. Plus if we didn't like it, we could always lay the wood-look planking over the painted concrete or tile it in the future. It would also satisfy Ron's desire to have this kind of floor and if it works out really well, we will have plenty of paint leftover to paint the cutting/ironing room too, making this really a cost effective job.

So what color did I choose to go in my sewing room you might ask? Well the walls in the sewing room are painted a pale yellow and the baseboard trim, doors, and closet doors are painted a medium turquoise, so I decided to go wild and chose what they call Tile Red! That will be one wild looking room, but what the heck, we have all different colored painted walls and doors in the house and all the colorful quilts hanging everywhere, so why not? I've always had an eclectic style, because I like so many things I could never have an entire house done in one style or one color. I can't even have one room done in only one style. My house is funky and very, very colorful!

The wood-look flooring idea that didn't work out.

Cement floor. As you can see if we had tried the semi-transparent stain all the patching and paint on the floor would show through. This is as good as the floor could get after all the paint removal and scraping. You should have seen it before it was this clean. Forgot to take photos of the real "before" floor. More photos will follow once the floor is painted and the tables are built (Ron's building me a huge table for my sewing machines).

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