Acid Staining

On a lighter note, we've made some more progress on the house again. We decided to keep the downstairs part of the addition concrete. Carpet would not serve my allergies well--I've vowed to have a house with no carpet (rugs, yes, but nothing that can not be picked up easily). Wood is too costly for now, plus it'd require building a subfloor which I don't really want to do again. So, concrete it is. Its still in progress, but I thought I'd post some pics anyways and then I'll add more when it's finished. This is before.

And after....
This is one place when more fore-thought on our part would have been wise. If we had known the floor would remain concrete, we probably would have put in radiant heat in the concrete like we did the tile in the bathroom. But, it's too late for that short of pouring more concrete on top of the current floor, so we'll have to live with it and get used to wearing slippers in that room. Actually, when the concrete was poured, we didn't even know we'd live here, so that wouldn't have been possible. Anyways, when we did finally decide on concrete, we immediately knew we wanted to acid stain it.


We've decided to do this house (thanks primarily to help from family) without incurring any debt. That's part of the reason it's been such a long, drawn-out process--the other part is that we (and especially 'Chung) are sort of perfectionists. There's always a bit of danger, when you're a perfectionist, in having someone do things for you. I think many times even IF we could have afforded to hire someone to do parts of the house (the wood floors or tile for example), we would still have done it "ourselves" (and of course, by ourselves I mean 'Chung).


I am still in awe that he's able to do so much of this house. Well, when it came time to do the acid staining we looked around and decided to hire someone to do it. We've got a lot going on right now, wanted to get it done quickly (not our greatest strength), and have the possibility of needing to use the room very soon for a friend or two who might live with us. So, we decided this might be a good time to bring in a professional. 'Chung has favorite saying when it comes to construction work. "You can have quality, you can have fast, or you can have cheap...any two, but you can't have all three." Generally we've found this to be the case. If its fast and high quality work, you can expect to pay top dollar. If it's cheap and quality, it'll take a long time. And we all know what happens to quality if it's fast and cheap. We tend to highly value quality and don't typically have much money. When we do subcontract work, we make it a priority to find someone who does excellent workmanship and plan to pay them accordingly.

Back to concrete. We found someone to do it. She worked fairly quickly--it only took 7 hours over the course of 2 days. This made me a little nervous, but I figured it's not really that hard (we knew we could do it ourselves, but just didn't want to spend the tons of time it takes to learn a new technique), and she's a professional so she does this all the time. When she was done this morning and left, she had done a lovely job, but the floor looked more splotchy and less blended than we wanted, so it's back to do it yourself for 'Chung. He's going to see if he can use is artistic talents to fix it tonight (blend in the brush marks, get rid of some of the glaring spots, etc)....and we'll see the final result in a few days.