The Sandlot: One Room Challenge, Week 5

Remember that time last week when I said "We've put on all of the concrete, now all we have left is to sand and seal the counters, we're almost done, this process is so efficient and definitely does not take over your entire house?"

Yeah...... not so much.

We started sanding early last week, and poor, naive us thought we could have it done in a couple days - unfortunately, sanding has been a major task. As we were sanding, we realized that the coats that we had put on previously weren't really smooth enough to sand to a nice finish. Most of it was okay, but we had some rough bits that weren't really possible to fix.

Because of that, we realized that we were going to have to apply a whole new coat of the Ardex feather finish to smooth out some of the inconsistencies the first round of sanding had uncovered. That took a few days, but made a world of difference in terms of the smoothness of the surface.

One of the things we learned as we went by was about application. We thought we could use drywall knives to get a perfectly smooth finish, but that fell down fairly quickly. Though we would wash most of the excess off of the knife, anything that remained would leave trenches in the soft concrete when we used it. We ultimately ended up having to use our fingers to smooth out some of the trenches as we went.

The other main thing to know about this project is that it. is. MESSY. Though we tried to contain the dust to our kitchen and even hung up a tarp to try to seal off that room from the rest of the house, we still ended up with a layer of concrete dust over basically everything in our house, including the upstairs. So after we complete this project, it'll be a pretty major project just to deep clean all of that.

All of that being said - as of this evening, we've (really this time) finished our final coat of Ardex, and our sanding! Though it's been a lot of work, we're already loving the look. We'll seal over the next few days.

Though the counters took up the vast majority of our time this week and weekend, there are a couple other things we got done as well. I finally was able to order the charcoal paint for the floors! I'm using Rustoleum Home Floor Coating in Charcoal Gray (linked here). It has incredible reviews, but it's been out of stock basically since I decided to do the ORC - and just this weekend, it came back! I ordered a couple gallons (which should be more than enough for the kitchen floors, since it covers up to 400 sq ft) of both the paint and the accompanying top coat. I'm going to test it on one of our extra tiles to make sure we like how it looks - and if we do, it's full steam ahead on dark gray floors!

The One Room Challenge is almost complete - just a little bit longer! This upcoming week we'll be finishing the counters, as I mentioned, and sanding cabinets to prep them for paint. Wish us luck as we push to the finish line!

Much love,

Claire