Having a nonchalant landlord is both a blessing and a curse: when my sink imploded in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner no one was to be found and we ended up washing service for fourteen hours in the bathtub (it affected the bathroom sink, too; we did all of our cleansing in the tub for almost a week and it still skeeves me out), but we're allowed to take doors off of cabinets, slap crazy colors on every surface, hang shelving wherever, and staple gun the hell out of the walls when we feel like hanging art on a whim. It came as no surprise, then, when asked if we could repaint the floors in the two bedrooms of our apartment, we got "Sure, take your supplies off next month's rent," in response. 

Granted, we were doing Mr. Landlord a favor since the wooden floors of all of the bedrooms of our apartment were already painted and in terrible shape; I'm talking gauges, cracked paint, warping, rotted baseboards and missing quarter-round. After moving all of the furniture out of both rooms, we scraped the hell out of the floors, swept, scraped again, swept and then sanded. Using a hand sander would have been easier and probably would have made for a better finish when all was said and done but we used coarse sanding blocks instead, easy because the bedrooms are really shoeboxes in disguise. I highly recommend a hand sander for larger rooms.

Next, we taped off the baseboards and primed all of the raw wood with Kilz 2 Latex Water Based Primer. We used very thin coats of the primer and it dried in about an hour.

 

Finally, we taped off the baseboards and painted the edges of the room with Benjamin Moore Floor and Patio Paint, brushing with the grain of the wood. When the perimeter was finished, we took out the rollers and got to the fun part. Rolling the paint on took all of ten minutes and immediately looked fantastic. The floors received a second coat two hours later and we didn't touch the rooms until the next morning. If I could have stomached sleeping in the living room a second night I probably would have given the floors more time to dry but they seem to be doing well as long as we step on them with stockinged feet only.

  Since we went over previously painted floors, our experience will be quite different for those of you who wish to paint a floor for the first time. Anna of Door Sixteen has a beautifully painted white floor and detailed steps to match, found here. Time Out Chicago's Julia Kramer looked to be in the same boat as us, and painted her floor gray with the addition of a cool stencil in white. And, for eye candy's sake, one of my favorite rooms on the internet has gray painted floors and served as our initial inspiration.

If your floors are beautiful and simply in need of a little TLC, check out Amy's post on refinishing. If you have a landlord who doesn't care, or really like the look as a homeowner, go for it! As it stands, I wish we had gone with a fun turquoise or yellow. Now that I've gotten the hang of floor painting (thanks to my little sister, who was the forewoman on this job), that might just happen before the holidays.

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