Linoleum Floor Cloth - my weekend project!

As we keep plugging away at remodeling the house, my mind is already in the "decorating" mode... and it has been for about the last year. Too bad you can't decorate before the dry wall is done or the plumbing is roughed in....  But one thing I have been thinking about is our eating area of our kitchen... where our table will sit. I personally prefer that a table be "grounded" visually with a rug underneath it. I think that the rug defines the area, beckons a person to it, and protects the floor from the chairs scooting in and out. The problem with a traditional area rug under a table is spills! (With a lot of littles around this house, our floor takes a beating daily)!  So the solution to my dilemma seemed to come with the idea of a floor cloth. It gives the best of both worlds: visually grounds the table, protects the floor, and is easy to clean!

I had several options, the first being to make one or buy one. Um, that was easy, I'm way too cheap frugal to purchase a ready made cloth. My next option was whether to make it out of canvas or linoleum. I really pondered this one awhile. But in the end, it seemed that linoleum would be easier/stiffer to work with than canvas. So that is the route I went. Then came the dilemma of designing it. I knew the color scheme I wanted to use, but I had no idea what design I wanted to paint. I searched the web and looked at dozens of floor cloths to get inspiration for my project. After getting a general picture in my mind, I got out my graph paper and drew it to scale experimenting with my color scheme. After I had an acceptable design, I was ready to get started.

I purchased a 6 x 9 remnant of linoleum at Lowes for just under $30. It had a 6x6 inch tile design on the front side of it which I wasn't crazy about showing through my rug, so I chose to paint the back of it instead. That being said, as I laid out my design, I could ever-so-slightly see the grid which really helped a lot when taping off.  I also will say that I MEASURED NOTHING on this rug (because I couldn't find any ruler, yardstick, or tapemeasure even after hunting high and low!). It was all "eye-balled". I didn't want it to be too perfect because I knew that I would have paint bleeding under the places I had taped off anyway (maybe other people have good luck with crisp, clean taped off lines.... I don't...). So if I started out with the mindset that "this will not be a perfect design", it would keep me from being too upset when it didn't turn out exactly as I had planned.

So here is what I did to create my floor cloth: First, I unrolled it and let it flatten out for awhile. After that I used a primer and gave it one coat. All of the paints I used were left over from our house remodeling project, and they were all latex based. I had planned on giving it 2 coats of primer, but I didn't have enough left for 2 coats... so 1 coat had to do.

After the primer dried, I painted the base coat. I chose the color of my kitchen walls for the background. I let it dry and then painted a second coat. This was the easy part because there was no taping off involved!

While I was letting that dry, I took a break and took a picture of a "too cute" 8 month old....

Now came the harder part... taping off and laying out the design. I decided to paint a boarder around 6 squares. I wanted each of the kids to have a square palette to paint their own picture in. I rummaged through our porch looking for something squarish to use as a template for taping off so that they would be somewhat even since I didn't have a measuring devise (note that I FOUND a tape measure AFTER I was done with the rug.....). In the corner I found some paper targets... 1 foot square each! And they were adhesive! So I was able to stick them right on the rug with out taping. After I positioned and stuck them on, I taped off a 1 inch-ish border around each one and sponge painted it sage green. At the same time, I taped off a border around the edge of the rug. I wanted one wide stripe and one narrow stripe, with a stripe of the background color in between them.

Note the "blue" electrical" tape... wouldn't you know that I ran out of painters tape when I had only 5 feet of area left to tape! (I found the frog tape that I KNEW I had... after the rug was done... and it was in the box of supplies that I looked through THREE times when I was frantically searching for it)!  But, FYI, electrical tape (with a couple of pieces of duct tape to hold the ends in place actually worked fairly well)!

After the taping off was complete, I rolled my red border around the rug. I did 3 coats of red, letting it dry between coats.

After removing the "targets" and the tape, here is what the rug looked like. I thought that the squares needed to "pop" a bit in their background color before the kids did their thing. So I painted each square with 2 coats of a bit darker tan.

Now it was ready for the kids to do their thing. This is the part that took much effort on my part... let-the-kids-paint-what-they-want-in-the-style-they-want-knowing-that-it-would-not-look-perfect... Why is that so hard???????  OK, I compromised... I helped Kyli (2) and Kaser (8 months) on their squares. But the others did their own thing... with the exception of Kenan (4) who painted his square with Daddy.

OK, this picture is upside down... but Kenan and Kyli did footprint butterflies and Kenan also did handprint tulips. That was interesting because he didn't want to make a hand print. He wanted to make a fist!

After the kids finished their masterpieces, I wanted to write Psalm 128 down the middle of the rug. Here is a tip: If you want to freehand anything on a rug, wall, etc... use CHALK before painting the design. It works better than pencil and it wipes off easily (unlike a pencil which needs erased). So I took chalk and wrote out the Psalm making sure that it fit somewhat evenly. Once I had it done in chalk, I decided that I liked the "light" color for the words rather than a "dark" color that I had envisioned. So I got a cream color and painted right over my chalk marks.  So there you have it: My weekend project. All that needs done now is 3 coats of a water based polyurethane which I did not have last weekend. So sometime in the next couple of days I will be finishing it up. What a fun, easy project!!!!!  Once it is completely done, I will update the post with a picture of it without the drop clothes!!!

Countertops: Cubic Zircon or Diamond?????

I love to cook. I love to bake. And it is a good thing, because I spend a large part of every day cooking for our family. So in gutting, redoing, and adding on to an old farmhouse that will eventually be our home, I have put many hours of research and thought into the kitchen layout. I have to admit, at first I didn't know if it was even possible for the existing kitchen to transform into something that would be functional for our family. I was pretty skeptical. But it really has been fun seeing it all come together. But then came the decision of what to use for countertops. At one time I thought it would be neat to someday have concrete slab countertops. But I have never met anyone who had them or anyone who knew anything about them... so I basically dismissed that notion. Granite or marble was completely out of the question because I'm too frugal to even consider it. So we decided that we would do laminate even though I wasn't exactly thrilled about that option. However, not knowing any better, I chose and bought my sink: a beautiful, large, double basin apron front farmhouse sink.... which also happened to be an undermount sink. I didn't know this was a problem. My contractor said something like, "I'm gonna have to think about this one...". Come to find out... I guess you can't use an undermount sink with laminate countertops because of the potential of getting water into the laminate seams and thus ruining the countertop.  But my position is always: where there is a will, there is a way! So that got me looking back into countertop options. I began to wonder about concrete again, so I did a google search about concrete countertops in Salina, Kansas.  The search introduced me to a "new" product which became the answer to my countertop problems.  The product is iCOAT. It is NOT a concrete slab. Rather, it is done by skimming a thin coat of a special concrete over an existing countertop (you can do it right over laminate). After the concrete is troweled on, then it is colored to whatever you want! It can take on the look of granite, marble, concrete, metallic paint.... whatever. Then, it is sealed with a 2 part epoxy that is heat resistant up to 500 degrees and never needs maintenance! It sounded too good to be true, so I called the guy who does it and I got to see some sample boards and even visit a client of his to see the finished product. We loved what we saw and decided that it was what we wanted to do.  The other cool thing about it is the price: $35ish/sq. foot.... labor included!  So for the price of good laminate, you get a product that is even better... with the high end look of granite, marble, quartz, or solid surface! Kind of like buying the cubic zircon, but letting everyone else think that it is a diamond!

Being a researcher, I looked for reviews of the product.... but I could not find any. So I had to go on the guy's word and the testimony of his clients who had their countertops done 3 years ago. This is a great option if you want to give your kitchen a facelift without tearing out your countertops.... it goes right on the top of the existing laminate. And unlike concrete slabs or granite, you don't have to reinforce your cabinets to hold the weight of it.  In our case, there were no existing countertops to coat with the concrete. So we had countertops built out of MDF and then had them coated.

So what are the drawbacks of this product? So far, the only drawback is the "curing out" time of the epoxy. Once the epoxy is put on, you can't touch it for 24 hours. After that initial time, you can touch it, but can't put anything on them for an extended amount of time for 2 weeks. In other words, you can wash dishes and set them briefly on the countertop, but you wouldn't want to let them set there overnight. After that 2 weeks, you can use them as you normally would. (I probably will give it a month before I set a crock pot on them for overnight oatmeal).


I'm posting the before and after pictures of my kitchen (which is still a work in progress). Please note that the pictures do NOT do it justice!!!!

These first 3 photos are the "BEFORE" pictures which show the MDF countertop.







Note my undermount sink which led me to search out other countertop options!!! I actually could have mounted the sink higher so that it was either level with the countertop, or even raised above it some... but since finding out about the iCOAT, I was able to leave it as an undermount. (Note that the 5 gallon bucket in the second picture is not a permanent fixture in my kitchen...!)

 



This is the butler's pantry. It used to be a bathroom. The upper cabinet was sitting in an upstairs bedroom in the house. I love reusing and re-purposing old stuff!!!










And these are the after photos. Again, they do NOT do it justice at all!

The glare is from the kitchen lights.

 The other cool thing about iCOAT is that you can get your perfect, custom color! I'm sure that if we had gone with granite, we wouldn't have gotten this perfect of a color/design!








 

The epoxy is very shiny... like glass. But you can buff it down if you want.

 Is it the "real" thing? Or not???? You would never be able to tell! The other great thing is that it really has a lot of "depth" to it. Who would have thought that it is only about 1/8ish inch thick? It looks like you can look into it forever!!!!!

So if you are wanting to update your kitchen or are in the market for countertops, I would HIGHLY recommend James from Blueline Construction in Salina, Kansas. He did a great job and was awesome to work with! His email is: james@bluelinesalina.com and his phone number is 785-643-0799.