There is nothing Aaron wanted more than a pool table. In fact, we bought the pool table before we bought the house. As soon as we moved in, he wanted to get the floors ready so he could get his pool table delivered. (It was delivered by two guys in a pick up truck.... which is not what I expected.)
The basement is beneath the entire house, but we intended to have different flooring on either side of the steps. This left 1000 square feet or so to be dealt with immediately. We considered vinyl flooring, tile before deciding to stain the concrete. Refinishing the existing concrete would be cheaper than any other floor treatment, and we did not need to know where every wall would eventually be. We bought a few different colors of stain, intending to create a mottled, mullticolored look.
First, we needed to sand the floors with a diamond sander. Renting this tool is rather cheap, but it's a messy exhausting job. Aaron had the week off work to finish the floors, and I remember coming home to a dust storm in my basement so think i could barely see three feet past the stairs. For the record, if he had connected the sander to a shopvac, or watered the floor and sanded wet, this dust storm could have been avoided. At this time, he only had one thing on his mind, and that thing was a pool table.
Oh, I should mention that we also painted the walls. I'll talk about that in a seperate post. In addition to nearly 60 years of grim, the floors were also coated in a fine paint mist from the paint sprayer. One the dust settled (litterally) and we cleaned up the floors, we tested the stains in an area we would later cover.
Maybe it was the colors we picked, or maybe the it was all the work it took to get the floors clean. None of the stand colors looked right to us. It just looked like the floors were dirty again. We decided to forget about staining the floor and just seal the newly sanded concrete as is.
