Saving the Big Bucks

For the barn apartment, I've decided on a floor of acid stained concrete.  I called a professional to get an estimate.  He said it's generally about 2.50 per square foot.  With 900 square feet to cover, that would be about 2,250 bucks.  Yikes.  I can't justify spending that on an apartment in the barn.  And, I really want a checkerboard pattern on it, which would just about double the price.  No.  I don't think so.

So, I decided...how hard could it be?  I'll do it myself!

And, this is me...doing it myself.

Not my finest fashionista hour, I must say.  But, this is farm reality.  You wear what you don't care about ruining.  This is acid, my friend, and it calls for rubber boots, rubber gloves, and those horrible protective eye goggles that nobody can see through.  If the floor turns out terrible, I'm blaming it on those goggles.

I won't know how it looks until the morning when it's dry.  I was hoping for a lighter brown color all over, and then to go back and tape off the squares, staining them again to a darker brown, but I'm thinking that this first coat will be too dark to put the checkerboard pattern on.

You can see the wall behind me that Tom has built.  He had to build a seven foot wall to fit under that steel beam, and then to get a regular eight foot high ceiling, he had to build that little pony wall on top of the steel beam.  It took a couple of weeks for he and Charles to build that.  Things should go much quicker for the rest of the interior walls because they won't have the beam to build around.

Those outer walls had to be built about ten inches thick and I hated to waste all that space, so I had them build in recesses or niches in one wall of each room, one of which can be seen directly behind me (the solid plywood area).  I'll probably have bookshelves built into them, or tuck a chest of drawers into them to save a few inches of floor space.