How To Clean Concrete After Carpet Removal

Removing carpet, want to treat the bare concrete underneath...

The wife and I hate our old carpet, and as we have dogs, we sure as hell don't want to replace it worth more carpet.

Has anyone tried painting or otherwise sealing their bare concrete underneath, and just using it as the floor? I've seen it done on TV, and done properly, it seems to look half decent.

I stained and sealed one with polyurethane once. It was pretty simple and looked "rustic" when done.

The house we just bought had HORRRRRIBLE carpet in it. And we decided to rip it out. This is what we did:

1)Rip out all carpet and tack strips
2)Vacuum well
3)Scrape excess glue and imperfections on the surface
4)Vacuum again
5)Mop with bleach solution
6)Painted the floor with Valspar Exterior Latex Paint (we used a greyish color) to give the floor a consistent color base (our concrete had about 193 different colors on it from paint and glue and such)
7)Apply Behr Semi Transparent Concrete Stain (we used a brownish/orange color)
8)Seal with floor grade polyurethane.

The only thing I'm not crazy about is the holes from taking the tack strips up, we didn't take the time to try and fill them in. You could do that if you wanted.

Everyone at Lowes/Home Depot will tell you that you can't do this and it won't work. We have a couple friends that have done it and it works great and looks pretty good too. We looked into putting wood/laminate floors in and it was going to cost us at least 8grand. Supplies cost us about $350 for 3 cans of paint, stain, and poly, plus painting supplies (like tray liners, rollers, and roller extensions).

We are in the process of doing it on the 3 bedrooms we didn't do originally.

Email is in the profile if you have any questions or anything.

I did acid stain to a room last year. We really liked the way it turned out. Few weeks ago I used the left over stain to do the back patio. I used a brand called Kemiko (sp?)

Process is pretty much like described above except no paint. Once you get it clean you acid etch it, then do several coats of sealer and wax.

It is really pretty easy. The hardest part is the cleaning. There is all kinds of crap on the concrete and getting it off is tough. So I literally spent a day cleaning the concrete, including renting one of those orbital cleaner things.

I don't like the holes from the tack strips either, but I'm not sure if patching them and having spots that stain differently would be better or worse.

We are now in a similar situation. Got two puppies this year. Den carpet has got to go soon. Wife would like to do the stain. My biggest reservation is that I have not found a good nice looking transition piece to go from the concrete to the tile it would border. It also smells pretty bad for a day or so.

Anyway, it is not hard and if two people worked at it you could knock it out in a weekend easily. After the full day of cleaning, the rest is spraying down something and waiting for it to dry or cleaning it off.

I'll post some pics if I can get a chance.

We do remodel work doing just as you have described. We remove the carpet, clean the glue, paint and such and fill in the tack strip holes. We also found tack hole patch material that responds to the acid stains predictably well.

Rather than leaving it as original concrete, we stain the concrete and then seal the floor. Our prices for remodeling start at $2.00 per sq foot.

Expect to spend most of 3-4 days cleaning the floor on a whole house, which is the key to a successful stain job.

A novice has a much better chance of being happy with their floor if they start with perfect concrete, which is not typical with a remodel. A clean porch is much easier to do!

Using colored sealer means you will lose the color when the coating chips, if you go with acid, the color is part of the top concrete layers and is only protected by a sealer. Solvent based sealers can be repaired if damaged and your color is not affected. Also, nothing has the beauty and character combined with excellent color durability that acid stain offers.

We prefer "Butterfield Color" products over "Kemico" because we find them more predictable on color and we don't have to filter clogging debris out of the acids. However, the Kemico burnishing wax is great, especially if you use a high speed burnisher to pop out the shine.

If you are interested in a quote from us, send an email.

Derek Holcomb
Renaissance Man
renaissancemantx@gmail.com

Absolute,

Have you tried looking at tile border pieces with a rounded edge to serve as a transition to your stained floor? You can usually find a suitable color that is suitable to match both the tile and the stained floor.

I have an aunt who, when they moved into their house, painted their floor "wood". They removed the carpet, patched holes and used a textured roller to paint the floor a wood pattern. Then clear coated the top to protect it.

About 15 years later, barring high traffic areas, it looks like wood. I didn't know this until about a year ago when I asked about the floor.

Just another option.

~egon

Derek,

I don't remember exactly how I settled on the Kemico. Only found one place to buy it in DFW down by Love field. I looked at several brands. I did make a last minute color change when I saw the samples on the floor at the place I bought the stuff. We are pretty happy with the color.

Would definitely be interested in a source for the patch stuff for the tack holes.

I have thought about the tile like that, but then I get into having to match the grout color, which the previous owner painted or something. Then I am worried that those thin pieces in high traffic areas might crack or come loose.

I saw a house on an inspection that had some sort of wood strip down. It looked really good. But I wasn't thinking about it and did not look really close at it.

My other reservation in my case is that my wife thinks it will be easy to pull up tile and do a larger area. I DO NOT WANT to do that.

We are in a situation where we don't plan to be in the house for more than about 3 more years. So we want it to be nice but whatever we do we want it to be sellable.

Honestly, I think we should just find a complimentary tile and tile the room. Most of the first floor of the house is already tile (was like that when we bought it.) That would take care of a lot of the potential issues. Haven't quite convinced the boss yet though.

This is what our concrete looked like after we pulled up the carpet. Pretty rough.

We didn't clean it as much as I wish we did as we rushed to get the master, hallway, formal space, and living room down over memorial day weekend. But this is what it looked like after we painted it.

After painting, we "stained" it. I guess it really isn't stained concrete, it's more stained paint, but it looks the same regardless. We're happy with it. This is what it looks like finished. Stained and sealed with poly.

Things we learned doing this:
1. The paint is really easy
2. The stain is REALLLLLY wattery and will splash all of the place. Wear clothes you are prepared to ruin because it will get all over you.
3. The stain dries ridiculously fast. You have to keep moving quickly to keep from visible lines showing from going over dry stain with wet stain.
4. Clean and scrape the concrete more than you think is necessary. In hindsight I wish we would have done this. We did it in the bedrooms we did after the fact and the finish is a lot better.
5. It's actually really easy. The paint takes about 6 hours to dry and the stain takes about 6 hours to dry. We gave them each 24 but we wanted to make sure. We gave the poly about 72 hours because we wanted to make really sure that it was completely dried so we didn't get visible spots when we walked on it.

ETA pics. Sorry for the tiny pics.

[This message has been edited by tamu2009 (edited 7/12/2012 9:59a).]

[This message has been edited by tamu2009 (edited 7/12/2012 10:00a).]

I always use www.tinypic.com for web-hosting pics. That way they're not linked to any personal account.

Oh. And sorry for the pics not being of the same room..

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