An old bench gets a painted makeover!

A thrift store command center makeover using Annie Sloan Chalk Paint®!

Check out my milk can makeover!

My obsession with chalk paint continues! For now, I'm just painting small things and trying to get a feel for the paint. I'm a total amateur at painting but practice makes perfect, right? Here are some things I've been painting lately. Right now I just have before pictures because they're not done quite yet. I recently splurged on some Annie Sloan Chalk Paint and I can't wait to show you what I'm doing with that!

My husband and I are on vacation from work this week and the major projects we wanted to complete were refinishing the upstairs floors. Here's some pictures of the loft bedroom floor when we first purchased the house:



We could tell there used to be carpet up there because of the little pieces of carpet padding hanging out and also the many staples we pulled out of the floor. The floor is just standard tongue and groove boards. They also make up the ceiling of the downstairs area, which we didn't really notice until stain started dripping through the downstairs ceiling! The boards that make up the floor were in rough shape. Mystery stains were everywhere and we found some definite pet stains. With 25+ years of being there, the boards shifted all around and are far from perfect. The spacing is an issue, which resulted in the dripping ceiling. We figured if this didn't work out, we could always put carpet back up there, even though my plan for this house is for it to be completely carpet free.

To prep the floor, we first swept it with our wet/dry vacuum. We tried to get every piece of dirt out that we could, just to see what the floor looked like. Visually, it actually didn't look too bad after sweeping it. Then we completely sanded the entire floor with a sheet sander and belt sander. Yep, we were down there using the smallest sanders possible! The belt sander did take some of the stains away, but was cutting the floor in some places, so we broke out the sheet sanders, which actually did a fantastic job. We had a small snafu with one of the sheet sanders so my husband actually just took a drywall hand sander and sanded that way for a while! Total professionals here.

Once we got everything sanded, we vacuumed again. We were going to wait to put the stain down because we weren't sure if the floor was clean enough, but decided to stain as sort of a last minute decision before we left for the evening. 

Here's the stain we used:


We were hoping to match the stain on the loft floor, but felt it was impossible to match a 25+ year old floor. We had no idea what stain the previous owners used, so we just bought the lightest stain possible. There's going to be a door and drywall in between the loft and bedroom, so even if the stains didn't match, it wouldn't be such a big deal.

Staining the floor was actually the easiest part of this entire project. I took a paint brush and stained around the wall areas and my husband used a roller to put the rest of the stain on. We wanted the stain to cover the entire floor and we weren't sure if the roller could get in the corners so that's why I painted around the sides first.

Now we're just waiting for the stain to dry:

The floor actually looks really nice and the imperfections give it the primitive look, which I love and fits this house perfectly. As an added bonus, the bedroom floor and the loft floor actually match pretty well, which was an awesome surprise.