Usually the decorative state of a laundry room doesn’t matter that much, but ours is also the hallway to get into the downstairs. I walked through there all time time. Out of all the room in our house it was the one that bugged me the most. I didn’t like a single thing about it. Boring, ill-painted (and damaged) walls, and awful stick on tiles. I hated the flooring. It was stained and ugly. So one day I started to see if we could get rid of it.

That started weeks of scraping off the stupid flooring. My husband got a good system down and did most of it. After a very short time, we had decided it really wasn’t worth all the effort. But when you start a demolition project, it is hard to change your mind. So we just lived like this for a month, and eventually it all got ripped out.

There was a good layer of adhesive left behind. I took a small section and scrubbed it off with a bunch of chemical, and then applied a coat of concrete stain. Just a little section to see if it would work out as I hoped. I was surprised and happy when it did. I wasn’t trying to do something that was unattainable!

I exposed myself to far too many chemicals one Saturday and scrubbed the rest of the adhesive off. That part didn’t actually end up taking more time than I imagined, but I would prefer not to ever have to deal with all the chemicals we used again. Final step was a couple of coats of concrete stain.

On hindsight, I would have not picked black, it shows dust and everything else far too much. (I bough the stain spur-of the moment on a home improvement store trip, so there wasn’t a lot of thought that went into color choice.) But, I am liking it much better than the stick on tiles. It was an inexpensive project, although it did take far too many labor hours.