The Troll and I are within the process of refinishing our basement. Actually, we've been inside the technique extra or much less ever due to the truth that we bought the house 18 months in the beyond--tearing out paneling, repairing partitions and ceilings, installing new lighting. But the present day stumbling block is the floor. The floor's now not pretty stage, so carpet, tile, or laminate would possibly require the set up of a subfloor. In addition to the price, this will consume up approximately half an inch of location from an already low-ceilinged room, and there may not additionally be room for it under the baseboard heaters. So my idea turned into to stain the concrete--till we were given round to tearing up the antique vinyl floor and noticed what the concrete looked like under. Not pretty.
So my next idea became to colour the concrete, but I modified into unsure approximately what form of paint to use and the way to comply with it. I favored some element environmentally benign, no longer too high priced, and smooth to apply--and of direction, I preferred it to look exquisite too. Then the day prior to this I got here across this weird but exciting concept: paper-bag decoupage. Basically, you tear paper luggage (or brown kraft paper) into odd portions, observe them in overlapping layers to the ground (various sources have suggested the use of wallpaper paste, water-based polyurethane, or a 50-50 dilution of Elmer's white glue), and seal the entirety with 5 or six coats of poly. The finished product has been defined as looking like natural stone (however a good deal softer underfoot) or distressed leather-primarily based. You can comply with a stain, too, if you need a color apart from the natural brown paper-bag finish.
It sounds crazy, however the extra I think about it, the greater it looks as if precisely what we want. Of route, our grocery save would no longer have paper luggage, so we'd truely have to buy the paper. But it seems like, for an investment of a day's labor and the value of a gallon of poly and a roll or of kraft paper, we should have an appealing floor end that might additionally make a terrific communique piece. And the beauty detail is, if we did no longer find it irresistible, we have to commonly paint over it, that's what we have been planning to do anyway.
So in which is the evident flaw in this plan that I'm overlooking?
