Studio Re-Do Part the Dos: The Nightmare That Was the Floor

So the poor, poor floor started out like this:

It had had a horrible life. The Young Couple from Whom We Bought the House hadn’t, it seems, taken into consideration things like, oh, “slope.” So the fact that the backyard slopes toward the house didn’t deter them from adding on a room on a slab, with nothing between the slab and the in-sloping yard except, well, air. Granted, it doesn’t rain a whole hell of a lot here in West Texas (in fact, I got an e-mail from an artist in China asking how we were doing in the current drought, and I was like, “drought?” because it’s just pretty much always the same, and you get used to it).

So imagine my surprise (and imagine the concomitant cussing) the night a couple years after we moved in when I awoke to big thunder and rain and thought to come out here and unplug the computer. It was dark, and when I stepped down from the sewing room, I stepped onto wet carpet. Forgive me, but other Cat People will understand that my first thought was “Damn hairballs!” You know?

But when my entire foot was quickly engulfed in water, I knew it wasn’t one of our Little Darlings. Not even Fat Mo could do that.

I turned on the lamp, which was probably a bad idea, given that I was standing in water, and discovered that the room was flooded. I spent the next two days hauling stuff to the dumpster—we’d lived here long enough for me to have gotten the room filled with all my stamping stuff, meaning a lot—A LOT—of paper, carefully stacked, well, pretty much EVERYWHERE. Lots of nice paper. Soaked. Paper, books, calendars—everything. Someone came out, dried it out, put the carpet back in place. I learned two things: don’t stack stuff on the floor (duh) and, when it rains, run around squealing, “no, no, no, no!”

So The EGE installed a sump pump at the lowest end of the yard and dug a ditch and just generally tried to fix it. Whenever it would rain, you’d hear the pump cycling on and off. But once the pump did NOT cycle, because it chose that particular huge inundating rainstorm as the moment to die, and we found ourselves outside, in water up to our knees getting soaked by pouring, driving rain, bailing water away from the house.

My studio still flooded, but not as badly as it would have if we hadn’t been out there, bailing away.

[I personally think the cussing helped a lot that time.]

So when I had The Fucking Edifice built, I had Bill and David build me a Flood Abatement Patio—you’ve seen it—that eliminated the risk of flood:  the patio slopes away from the house (what a clever idea:  sloping away from the house!) and, as a Back-Up Safety Feature, has two drains near the house, just in case. (They’ve never been called into use, since the patio drains so well, but it turns out they’re PERFECT for bucket dyeing—the drains go directly into the pipe that leads to the sewer. Serendipity).

Perfect.

But:  the carpet, although professionally dried, never quite recovered. It was over 20 years old, and it looked it. It was hideous:  I kept it covered with dyed rugs so I wouldn’t have to think about it.

So we pulled it up. Rolled that sucker up and slid it out the window (so clever:  carrying a huge roll of carpet through the house = recipe for disasters. Many of them).

Then we pulled up the padding. Now, half the room had a light padding that came up easily. The other half had a darker, denser padding, and it didn’t want to come up. The dark, gooey residue it left behind was hideous:  when I tried to scrape it, it smeared. We scraped, we chiseled, we sanded. All without much luck.

I called the rental company to get a drum sander, which I did NOT want to do, having used a drum sander on The EGE’s study, all by myself, several years ago. Holy crap, those things are heavy. Messy. Noisy. The guy at the rental center made the mistake of telling me I wouldn’t be able to unload it by myself, so of course I had to unload it, get it into the house, use it, get it back outside.  All by myself. By then, I figured I’d proved myself (to whom? no one else cared) and so waited to put it back into the truck until The EGE got home to help me.

Turns out, though, that nobody had a drum sander to rent. Come on down, though, they said, and we’ll see what we can find.

Cutting to the chase:  they sold me part of a gallon of $60-a-gallon green solvent (meaning:  safer to use, low odor). They’d tried it out on the concrete floor in the shop, and it looked great—it had taken the cement paint off easily. So we brought it home and smeared that stuff on the sticky parts of the floor and waited.

And then began scraping it up. That was the nastiest, gooiest, most disgusting-looking stuff you’ve ever seen in your life. A combination of molasses and snot and partially-digested escargot all mixed together and ladled onto the floor.

Gack.

On our knees, late at night, we scraped it up and dumped it into a coffee can. Then we washed the floor. Also on our hands and knees. And then we rinsed it. (The part under the washer and dryer was just a write-on:  we never did get all the vinyl adhesive off that, even with a heat gun. So it didn’t get stained.)

And the next day, again on our hands and knees, we stained the floor (except where the washer and dryer go). The EGE went first, wetting the floor and then painting on stripes of Quickrete Semi-Transparent Concrete Stain in Cheyenne Rocks, a kind of brick red. I came right behind him, while it was still wet, with a sponge in one hand and a brush in the other. I squeezed Tuscan Sunset (the gold) in arcs and then did sine curves in it with the brush.

Need I describe how exhausting this was?Neither of us has Good Knees, anyway, me with the arthritis and him with a pin holding his together. By this point, our hands are sore (the scraping), our knees are trying to kill us, life is not Sweetness & Light, OK? But we got it done, and The EGE started cleaning up, and I was sitting on the step from the sewing studio, looking at the floor, and I realized it just looked like crap. I hated it. So I put on my ratty old socks, like they were going to protect my feet, and I got my water and the gold stain and went back and worked in more gold. A lot more gold—that’s where you get the splatters and dots and globs of color. On the first pass, the colors had mixed too much. Once I got this gold put on, I had hope.

And here’s what it looks like. I’m really pleased with it. I would have liked it to be oranger, and I was trying to figure out how to make that happen, given that there’s no orange concrete stain, but when I put the wood stain on the woodwork—stain that was supposed to be Mandarin Orange but was not—it turns out they looked perfect together:  the woodwork and the floor. So it was fate all the way around, even if I don’t believe in fate.

And that’s it.

My studio is almost completely finished—just a couple more mirrors (for more light) and some decorative stuff. Instead of showing you photos of that, though, I’m going to do a video tour. We’ve got something else planned for photos—more about that later. Stay tuned!