I Painted My Tile Floor and Here's What Happened.

We had wanted to change our foyer tiles before we even bought the house.. it was always one of the things we were going to do. But it was low on the priority list and so five and a half years later we finally came around to it. The tiles lead into our powder room which as most of you know is also a project we are working on. While we hired someone to fix up the bathroom, after reading and watching many youtube videos about how to paint tile we decided we would give it a go. 

Step One - Sand the tiles. I have an electric sander from when we re did M's office. That is the only way this would have been possible. I would not have been able to sand such a large space by hand and would have most likely skipped the step. I did not see much difference in the tiles after sanding so it could have skipped. If you have any missed grout now is the time to have it filled and fixed.

Step Two - Clean the tiles. I bought a degreaser and hand cleaned the tiles twice. 

Step Three - M taped up the moldings.

Step Four - Prime! I used a paint brush to paint the edges and grout. Argh so much grout. Then came out the 9in roller with extendable pole. Thankfully we were able to used all our current supplies.. we have so many have used cans of paint.

Step Five - Base Color. We painted it black! Started again with a brush painting the edges and grout. And then tree coats of paint.. M gave me a hand and did a coat as well. It looks so great already :) 

Now full disclosure.. my body was already starting to scream. I had to pop a few Advil's every night and the hot water bottle was only half helpful. 

Step Six - Stencil. We have a octagon dot pattern tile and all the stencil we say were in a square pattern. We considered a few options.. number one, find a stencil design to fit into the octagon and then either leave the dots empty or pick and element from that design to place on the dots. 

Something like this. All the other DIY's we saw online were dealing with square tiles. I contacted Cutting Edge Stencils and they suggest I buy a square one and just go over my tiles ignoring the shape and pattern. It seemed the easier solution so we went with it.. and bought the Kerala tile stencil.

I started in the corner.. I wiped down the surface each time before starting to stencil. I bought a little foam roller to go over the stencil. According to Cutting Edge Stencils as well as all the posts I read about stenciling suggested taking very little paint so as to prevent paint bleeding through. I had to do three coats.

 
There was still a little bleeding :(  It was my first one so I hoped practice would make perfect.

A few stencils later I still had bleeding, three coats were taking a long time and very quickly my foam roller was starting to disintegrate leaving little foam particles behind.. which I then had to spend time picking out and retouching.. argh.. seriously.. so much argh. I watched a few more video's on youtube and saw one woman using a brush.. she would take very little paint on her brush and use circular motions to spread the paint out evenly. My wrist started to hurt very quickly. :( I found a foam brush and D's art supplies and gave that a try..

and I finally found the method that worked for me. It still required two coats and it took approximately one hour to do each stencil. Yes, one hour! 

Look at it spread. My body still hurt and I did this and only this pretty much all day long.. I cried more than a few times, my body hurt, I felt like I was neglecting the boys and I was just plain miserable. But I had come to far to stop now. 

M started to pitch in on weekend doing touch ups and we required many. Also there was the chore of cleaning the stencil. Everyone online said you just rinse off the stencil to remove build up.. but it was not as easy as that.. I had to peel the paint off.. use my finger nails to get it out of corners and it seemed like all of it never came off .. not fun! 

The corners were also a pain.. once finished M used a polyurethane to seal the floor. We did four coats, we weren't sure how thick or thin the layers should be so we plan on doing a coat each year to keep the paint from chipping and finger crossed helping the floor have a long life.

All in all I didn't have a great experience.. I feel we tackled a space far too large. If it had been just the powder room it would have been far more manageable. While we spent very little money on it we believe time is also valuable.. and it cost us too much time.

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