When we moved into the house, we had a difficult situation in our master bedroom. I’m talking about is the fact that there was a health risk in the room in the form of a big, dusty pink, plush, slightly mouldy wall-to-wall carpet. We are all allergy sufferers and sinusitis is a standard condition in spring-time. But every time we walked into our bedroom we could not take a breath without starting to cough. That carpet was instant asthma and we could not continue living with it, it had to go. But it had to be a budget-friendly flooring solution.
An outdated & mouldy wall-to-wall carpet
Here is the before, even though we had it cleaned professionally before we moved in, it still felt dirty and had a mouldy smell…
We decided to rip it out and deal with whatever was underneath it. We would figure it out as we went along. So we moved our furniture out of the room, 3 weeks after moving in.
Budget-Friendly Flooring Solution:
My husband shut himself in there with a dust mask and a couple of hours later he came back out with a lot of trash bags filled with carpet, underfelt and just plain old dirt. The underfelt had a couple of mouldy spots, especially in the dressing room area. After he removed the underfelt he started vacuuming. He had to clean the vacuum filter 7 times before he got rid of all the dust. The concrete screed sub-floor was not as smooth as we had hoped, but it was way better with the carpet out!
He removed the quarter rounds with the carpet, but luckily the skirting extended all the way to the screed. The quarter-rounds were damaged, so we decided not to put them back up.
We cleaned the floor very well with water and regular floor cleaner first. Then we cleaned it with swimming pool acid (diluted 1:1 with water) to remove all adhesive traces and kill the mould in the problem spots.
Then we started painting the floor with Gripseal Pavecoat paint in Charcoal colour. This is based on road-marking paint formula and is perfect for painting concrete floors. We did 2 coats, and although the concrete floor is not so smooth, and has imperfections, we love it!
Almost 5 years later:
After 4.5 years, wear and tear spots are visible in the heavy traffic areas, but it has held up pretty well considering we did not prime or seal. I just touch up the spots every now and then. We had a rug from our previous house’s living room, which fit the bedroom space perfectly. That also helps to protect the floor and is a lot easier to clean than the old carpet.
We did not want to spend too much money on this as we knew our long term plan was to take out all carpets in the house and install either tile or vinyl. We did not have a lot of time on our hands and we needed to sort out the health risk asap, so it had to be a quick fix.
I’m still to this day so happy we did go this route, the style was much more us in any case and I’m happy to live with it for a while still till we can spend the money for the real flooring upgrade.
What do you think? Would you have stencilled a pattern over it to hide the imperfections, or chosen a different colour? What would you have done to this floor, I would love to hear from you in the comments down below.
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Update: We took the next step and installed Sheet Vinyl Flooring – You can read about it here.
Goodbye for now
