Bedroom Transforms into Office

With both the hubs and I working from home we have to have a great working space. So the first redo in the house that we're doing ourselves is converting a bedroom into an office. The renovation is not complete but I thought I'd share with you all where we are at with it.

The room to begin with had bright tropical green walls and tan carpet. We began by ripping out the carpet to see what we had to work with under it. It was of course concrete covered in paint splatters from when the house was first built. OH JOY! My first course of action was to get an orbital sander and the biggest grit paper for it I could find. I spent over 2 hours sanding it on my hands and knees trying to get the paint splatters to break up. With my efforts, about 90% of it came up giving me a clean platte to work with for staining it. Yes I know I could have use some harsh abrasives to get it up and etch the concrete, but firstly we are living in the house so I did not want the fumes, secondly I did not want to hose down the floors with water afterwards and shop vac it all up, thirdly we don't have outside water I would use to rinse in my home— we only have well water for outside currently but this will soon be fixed.

After the sanding of the floors and a good cleaning of them, I tapped the baseboards and the first 3 feet of the wall up to protect it from overspray. I then grabbed BEHR concrete stain in Tuscan Gold, filled a garden sprayer with it, and went to town spraying the floors. Wow, Tuscan gold was less gold and more pumpkin orange. Went on more like paint and less like a stain too.

I stayed calm and did not totally freak out. I ventured back to Home Depot to grab more sand paper and a new color of stain, this time Desert Flagstone. I resanded the floors lightly this time around, only took about an hour or so and left the Tuscan Gold stain in all the grooves of the floor. The floor looked as though it was older and ironized or something. Can we say happy accident? After cleaning the floor I began applying the new color of BEHR concrete stain via a fine mist and hand blotting. Once my knees regained blood flow and the floor had dried over night, I applied a coat of matte BEHR concrete sealer. A few hours later I was pulling all the tape and plastic down getting the room ready for paint on the walls.

We wiped down all the walls with a damp cloth to get the dust off from all the sanding, patched a few bad places we found where the original paint did not adhere to the wall and after sanding that, vacuumed the baseboards and floors to assure dust was gone. The hubs caulked a few places that had separated in the crown molding, and after taking the fan blades down were we finally ready to paint.

We choose to go with Sherwin Williams color "Magnetic Gray". We went ahead and got a 5 gallon bucket as this is also the color we want in our master bedroom and bath. As we began to apply to paint I quickly remembered how hard it is to paint above your head since we started with the ceiling. You need at least two people painting a room, one rolling and one cutting in to hep make it look correctly.

The color went on a tad darker than I had anticipated as we were painting— it went on lighter than it dried. But in the end I love the color!

Our grand plan is to build a custom "U" shaped desk around the room with different working zones for us. It also will even have a place to slide in the great dane's kennel. I'll keep you all posted on our progress!

xoxo- Livin' the Gulf Dream