My husband was on a business trip last week, so I made it my goal to get the house as clean and organized as possible while he was away. There’s no better way to start your weekend than with a tidy house!
After mountains of laundry were washed and folded, the dishes were cleaned, and the bed was made, I was left with a few nights on my hands to do projects. The first thing I decided to tackle was our coat closet and main hallway.
Remember when I mentioned the washing machine incident during our master closet re-do? Here’s a reminder of what happened to the carpet in our hallway.
We couldn’t really leave the carpet on the floor for it to mold and mildew, so for the past many months we have been living with this.
I will admit concrete floors are better than soggy floors, but not by much. So while Stephen was out, I decided to come up with a temporary, inexpensive solution – PAINT!
I started out with the leftover paint from our dining room walls. (Note: This is latex paint on bare concrete floors. I don’t expect this to hold up forever and I wouldn’t recommend this method if you’re looking for paint that will last!)
Painting the hall with a roller took less than 30 minutes – I was shocked at how quickly it went!
Because it went so fast and because I decided I wasn’t in love with this shade of brown, I got out a couple other colors (red from our front door and black from Stephen’s studio trim) and mixed up a custom color.
This brown was much better and dried much closer to the color of the wood floors we eventually want to get throughout the house.
Turns out I BARELY made enough paint to do the entire hallway one more time. I didn’t even have enough to re-paint the little coat closet at the front of the hallway, but a strip of painters tape made it look like I went for the two-toned look on purpose.
Are you ready for our temporary flooring solution? Here she is!
Plus a little glimpse at the coat closet…
And now for the final side-by-side. Much better, no?
I am still looking forward to covering up this concrete floor with wood one of these days, but just a little bit of (free) paint certainly helped make this hallway more livable for the time being!
