Glitter Floor

The glitter floor project has been ongoing at least since Christmas 2013.  The logic was that I was going to rip out the carpets of every bedroom upstairs and just paint the sub floor (or chip board, pressboard whatever you want to call it) until we could afford to put in something nicer.  So, I figured why not have some fun in the craft/room office and put some glitter on top of the paint and seal it… can’t be that hard right?  Well after some googling and seeing what others did on their garage floors with paint and a good epoxy sealer, I was aching for a glitter floor!

This was the video that inspired me:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOWLFhTXRQ4
The issue was that she was using products made for a concrete floor... on a concrete floor.  I didn't have a concrete floor, and I didn't find anyone crazy enough to try and pretty up a chip board floor... No biggie right? :P

Carpet BEGONE!

So I made a  trip to the paint department of my local Homedepot store to talk to the paint guy.  I almost abandoned the project because he was telling me that garage floor paint is way way way smelly and it’s not made for wood.  So he suggested using flexible caulking to fill all the seams, gouges and nail holes left by contractors that knew they would be covered by carpet.  Then cover the whole floor in porch paint and while the paint was wet sprinkle on the glitter and let dry.

All the dust sucked up, staples removed, holes patched with caulk, baseboards taped up.

Well, the idea was great in theory, but a few problems came up.  First problem was that I decided on a white floor and bought white, opalescent and silver glitter at the craft store.  I mixed all the glitter in a big salad bowl in preparation to spread it out like grass seeds.  Painted the floor white (2 coats) and on the last coat while the paint was still wet I started to toss the glitter like I was Tinkerbelle at a Disney party.

Second coat of paint going on

Big salad bowl full O glitter :D  This picture always make me grin like an idiot LOL

Then OMG, I ran out of glitter halfway through the room … what the hell??  Did you see the size of the salad bowl... it was full!!!!  Jump in the car and race off to the craft store to buy several more containers of glitter… race back and toss the glitter over the last half of the room hoping that the label was right and that there was really a half hour of drying time.

The next morning I gingerly touched the floor to see if the glitter had stuck to the paint and it did not!!  *sigh* I checked further into the room and not much of it had stuck in the first half of the room either.  I debated on what to do and decided to just sweep up the glitter, dump it back into the big bowl and see what actually stuck.  Not much of it stuck at all and to add insult to bad planning the contrast between the pristine white floor and the silver glitter made it look like pepper on mashed potatoes, or just dirt.  More debating went on in my mind as to how to salvage this project because I wasn't going to give up on the glitter floor!

DIRTY!  I didn't take a pic before it was swept up, but this is what actually stuck to the floor.

Since the glitter was already mixed, and it would be another bunch of money to go out and buy glitter again, I decided to paint the floor with grey porch paint to reduce the contrast.  I also decided that I needed the paint to be as wet as possible when applying it, so instead of tossing it like Tinkerbelle I re-used some of the glitter containers with the sprinkle top so that I could shake it onto the floor like parmesan on spaghetti.  I worked in smaller sections of 2 feet by 3 feet, shake shake shake and then paint another patch and then shake shake shake again until the whole floor was covered.  

New Plan:  Grey porch paint.

It's hard to see the sparklyness.  Grey porch paint for the win!

It wasn't the white sparkly floor that’d I’d dreamed of, but it was much better than the first try.  Regardless of the results not being as great as I would have hoped, I am still happy it’s not carpet.  What did turn out really great was the sparkle walls.  I ordered packets of a special wall glitter that you mix with water and then apply to your walls over your base paint colour.  I couldn’t get Valspar paint crystals in Canada.  When I received the packets I followed the directions and started painting the walls.  It was easy to do and I think they turned out great because it’s opalescent glitter on top of white walls.  Very subtle but very cool.  While using the packets I quickly realized that it is probably just craft store glitter with wall paper paste for the binding agent.  Probably very cheap to make, and I paid a fair amount, so kudos to them for thinking of that brilliant idea.  Maybe I’ll try making my own in another room if you can still buy wall paper paste in a powder format.

Sparkly wall in the sunlight

So after all that was said and done, I painted the puny baseboards and the trim around the door and window white and started moving in the furniture.  I got some white curtains for the window and I'm going to use a curved shower curtain rod to hide the closet area/costume dressing room space.  I still need to put up the curtains and the shower curtain rod, but the furniture is moved into the room.  I still need to do a bit more organizing of the craft supplies, but I'm writing this post from within all this sparkly goodness right now :)

This room took me a few months to do the bulk of it because of the need to re-do the floor (which threw me for a loop) and a lot of my weekends were taken up with my day job.  I’m hoping the next rooms will go quicker because I’m not doing a special treatment to the floors or the walls.

I will post an update later on with a picture of the room with it's curtains and all the craft stuff cleaned up in the storage pieces. I just felt that I needed to start updating the blog with all the things we've been doing since Christmas :)