Editor's note: Bill and Gay Chapman, along with their son, William, have been restoring Bill's ancestral home, Enon Hall, in Virginia, since 1999. Bill has been keeping a journal of the trials and tribulations of restoring a very old home. The following entries and photos tell the story of the Chapman's kitchen floor. The Chapmans thought painting the floor would save time -- but found out differently.
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January 28, 2001
Today I built a new breakfast bar in the kitchen. Gay and I have decided that any changes made in the kitchen should be treated as temporary, since we'll ultimately want to redo the entire space...but not anytime soon. So we're definitely trying make any short-term changes as inexpensive as possible. Therefore, the new breakfast bar is made out of a 24" X 80" hollow core door and an upside down newel post as a corner brace. All done except for some finishing trim and paint.
February 4, 2001
My last journal entry stated that the new breakfast counter was all finished other than some trim work and paint. Well, that was before I decided that tiling the countertop would eliminate the lightweight feel of the hollow core door that I used for the top. But I like tiling, so this was a fun little afternoon project for me. Now all it needs is trim, grout and paint. We've also decided to paint the kitchen floor, paneling, and cabinets. Then the kitchen will be all set for the summer. --
February 9, 2001
Finished up the new breakfast bar in the kitchen (well, all but some trim around the top edge) and Gay and William began painting the kitchen paneling and cabinets.
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February 18, 2001
We spent all day today on our hands and knees on the hard kitchen floor. While Gay applied a second coat of paint to the cabinets, William and I taped off the 18 inch diamonds on the floor. Then Gay and I started painting the floor while William moved from square to square like a human chess piece.
February 24, 2001
The floor paint is not bonding to the kitchen floor. You can just scrape it up with your fingernail. Gay thinks the floor has wax on it and that is preventing the floor enamel from bonding. Problem is, of course, that half of the floor is now painted with diamonds and they need to come up. Looks like we'll be renting a floor sander next weekend and sanding down the floor. And if we're going to do that, we might as well just go ahead and refinish the floor too. We had decided to paint the floor in the first place because we thought it would be easier than sanding and refinishing. But it looks like that's exactly what we'll wind up doing after all.
Oh well. It's a mess, but it's our mess.
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March 3, 2001
The kitchen floor saga continues. Given another week of drying time, the paint seems to be bonding better to the floor. You can still scrape it up with your fingernail if you really try, but it's holding up fine to walking. Therefore, we've decided to proceed with the diamonds as planned. Once we're finished with the painting we are going to seal the floor with polyurethane in the hopes that it will provide a protective finish that will prevent the paint from scraping up.
In hindsight, we did just about everything wrong with this project. I was half way through taping the floor the first time when I realized that I should have painted the entire floor with one color and THEN taped off the diamonds to be painted in the second color. But at that point I didn't want to pull up all of the tape and start over: That would have been the smart thing to do. Instead we're doing this the HARD way. We will be another couple weekends and countless more rolls of blue masking tape before this "quick" project is done. (Apparently there was a great article on painting a floor diamond pattern in a Martha Stewart magazine within the last year. Obviously we have not been able to put our hands on it.)
March 11, 2001
Wonderful warm day today. Gay put another coat of paint on the kitchen floor...
March 25, 2001
Put a coat of semi-gloss polyurethane on the painted diamonds the kitchen floor. I'm hoping that this will allow us to tape over these diamonds without pulling up any paint so that we can paint the other half of the floor and finish this project up.
March 31, 2001
Put the first two coats of paint on the offsetting diamonds on the kitchen floor. (If you're tired of reading about this floor, imagine how we feel!)
April 6-8, 2001
We also pulled up the last of the tape on the kitchen floor, finally revealing the completed diamond pattern. Everything looked great so we applied a coat of semi-gloss polyurethane to the entire floor after William went to bed. Put another coat of polyurethane on the kitchen floor before we went to bed. On Sunday, we happily proclaimed the kitchen floor finished and brought the furniture back into the room.
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May 15, 2001
The kitchen floor is wearing quite nicely so far! And we haven't been treating it lightly either. It got lots of dirty boot traffic this past weekend and took the abuse just fine. (Knock on wood!)
See Features for more OHW stories about Bill and Gay Chapman's restoration projects.
