Home Improvement: Basement Floor
Our basement isn’t big enough to be a mecca of entertainment; instead it’s big enough to comfortably house the furnace, water heater, softener, washer and dryer. There’s quite a bit of storage space as well, and we definitely use it. But it’s not an extremely pleasant place, with the concrete floor and exposed plumbing and electrical wiring.
A few weeks ago we redid an area of our building at work that was in a back part of the building, and in order to make it a bit more attractive one of our guys used a epoxy based floor paint around that area to make it look nicer. I was very pleased with how it turned out, and decided that we should do it in our basement to make it look nicer as well!
So, here’s me doing the pre-paint mopping:
Now, they sell this stuff as a kit, and the kit covers 250 sq ft. Our basement is about 450 sq feet, so we knew we would need two kits. However, it takes a couple of days to dry completely, so we decided to do the whole basement in two phases, over two weekends. That way we could let hal of the floor dry, move everything, then let the other half dry.
Here’s Annie putting down the first phase of floor coating.
We learned a few things about epoxy paint that day: it smells really bad, the bad smell completely permeates the house, and the paint is a sticky mess. All in all, good times!
After that half of the floor dried, we moved things about and did some more.
Then when it was all done, we moved the washer and dryer back to its normal place.
The paint came with a container of colored paint flecks which you could use to add some color to the floor (notice the little white, black, and blue spots on the floor). All in all I’m really pleased with how it turned out. It makes the basement much more pleasant.
Now, the only problem is that it makes the walls looks really bad, which means a fresh coat of paint on them is in store for the future.
October 11th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
Make it a remote server-room, so you can have most of your boxes out of the office.
There’s a decent cheap ($50) storage rack from Home Depot, rated to 800lbs/shelf (that’s what the docs say, but I’d only trust it to 200lb/shelf).
October 12th, 2006 at 6:34 am
That does look nice. We did the same thing to our garage floor last year and it made a world of difference.
October 16th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Looks so great! I hope to do the same thing to my garage floor. How much did one kit cost?
October 16th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
50 bucks a kit. They make stuff special for garages and it’s a bit more expensive, but it’s more durable for the stresses that cars put on the floor.