Top It Off: The floor

With the Top It Off space came the original tile from when it was a car dealership. And, as I talked about before, the things you can't change, embrace them. Because this tile was so old, it was nearly impossible to remove and if you did there was nothing but gravel under it. So, we kept it and actually love the way it turned out.

We had to work really hard to get all the construction dust off of it. Tyler mopped it 4 times! Then we put a clear sealant on it to help make it look a little younger.

The back of the store was carpet. After we took up the carpet we found that they really enjoyed the glue they used under the carpet. After working for weeks on getting all the glue up, it was time to acid stain the concrete. We had been planning to do this all along. We had seen it in some other food places and loved the effect.

The floor had to be wet for the acid to stick. I would mop a section, Tyler would apply the acid, and Zach would then scrub it in circles to make a nice effect for the finish.

Please note it is well after dark while we were doing this. We had to wait for the construction people to leave so no one would walk on the floor.

The floor then was to dry over night.

As it turned out, it didn't look as good as we had hoped. It could have been a number of things but we had to do something about it fast.

The decision was to paint it.. or a proxy for the official term. Zach would paint and I would sprinkle the paint chips behind him. (I reference my love for decorating cupcakes for this task!) I might be a little... ok ... a lot bias but I think the sprinkles look amazing.

We started on this at 9:00 PM and got done about 2:00 AM

The new floor looks absolutely great!

Next Up: The details!