The garage has become more than just a place to park your car and store a few tools. Many of use use it as a utility room or want to create a space that is a bit more inviting and not always considered "dirty".
The first step in converting your garage into a more useable and appealing space is to redo the floors. Our friend Matt recently shared his process of installing an epoxy coating over his stained and chipped garage floor and so far he's very pleased with the results. Matt lives in Mesa, Arizona which has extreme summer temperatures (115 degrees+). Garage floors must withstand hot tires and not stick or melt in the heat.
For his garage floors Matt chose a local product, Veron Coating's Granite-Cote System, that simulates the look of granite or terrazzo flooring. He went with a medium brown base and paint chips in dark brown, cream, and black. Granite-Cote is a durable, chemical and abrasion resistant seamless system and is easy to clean. Perfect for a garage floor which must withstand a ton of abuse.
Here are the steps he took.
Spray paint can be a wonderful, convenient thing. But the downside? The fumes and residual splatter make it a material better suited for use outdoors. What if you get the urge to spray paint something when it's windy, or cold, or raining?
Here's an ingenious solution: use a plastic wardrobe to create a tent in which you can spray paint small to moderately sized items. You're surrounded on all sides by the wardrobe, preventing any splatter, and when you're finished painting, you can zip the wardrobe closed and let the fumes dissipate.
Our friends at ApartmentTherapy [www.apartmenttherapy.com] suggest inserting a piece of cardboard in the bottom of the wardrobe and flipping it upside down for use as a protective tent.
We previously mentioned stencils as a great way to add an innovative appearance to your wood stairs. The DIY tools are also a fun, creative way to add embellishments to your walls and furniture.
Thanks to an increasing awareness of street art, stencils are becoming a more popular tool for creating a wide array of designs. Now you, too, can channel your inner Banksy and use your home as your canvas.
When you create a stencil, you'll want to decide a few things first to help identify what material you should use. The size and frequency of use are two of the major factors. If you're going to be repeating a design on a large surface, you'll want a more durable stencil that will stand up to the job.
Before our second child was born, we realized that our bathroom, shown above, needed some serious TLC. After three years of time warping every time we needed to tinkle and one genetic byproduct underfoot as it was, we needed our only(!) bathroom to not just become more functional, but be a space we liked spending time in, because between bath time, potty training, and regular hygiene, we were going to be spending A LOT of our time in the tiny space.
After a great deal of consideration, we headed to the home improvement store to see what our quick-fix options were for the biggest eyesore in the room -- the tile.
We had been told that due to the slick surface of tile plus its porosity, it was not a paintable surface. Besides that, we knew regular wall paint wouldn't hold up to regular water exposure, but luckily for us we have tile everywhere EXCEPT the shower.
