Home Improvers For Hire

We've completed our first real home improvement project! We sealed and painted our garage floor! We ran into only a few pitfalls. Perhaps you can learn from our mistakes:

1. Never, never, and I mean never assume that it will be easy to strip old paint from a concrete floor. We probably didn't need to strip our floor, but we decided to do it anyway. We really wished that the paint stripper would have included a warning label that said in bold type: "Beware! I am your worst nightmare!"
2. Power sprayers, though awesome, put out VERY hot air. Jon nearly burned a hole in his leg, and though we'll spare you the details on the blog, feel free to call us for a cool story. Seriously, though, power sprayers are fun.
3. Do not snap the handle off your only long-handled roller at 10:35 pm on a Friday night when you are just three-quarters of the way through with your project, and the paint, now mixed, lasts only six more hours.
4. If you do snap the handle off that roller, Wal-Mart is open. But make sure that you've left yourself an exit from the room you are painting so that you don't have to make a sprightly leap across your painted floor to get to the door. Oops.

We didn't get the best clarity with these pictures, but here are the before and after garage floors:

BEFORE

AFTER

Now we can say that we're true homeowners!