It had always been my intention to put white flooring down in the Old Doctors Surgery.  Having lived for 10 years in New Zealand I’ve become seriously obsessed with light.  The brightness and the sky in the Antipodes are expansive and seem never-ending.  My current home in Scotland – such a dark country especially in December – needed to be as bright as possible for my brain to be creative and live freely.

An interior designer would advise on a room going from dark to light to mimic the natural rhythm of the earth from the soil to sky.

The rules are there to be broken, right?  Your home is your space (owned or rented) and you must always stay true to your own style when creating a living environment for relaxing, living, working, creating and growing.

It has become more popular than ever now to paint your floor glossy white.  Especially in Scandinvian design of late.  If you were to look back over some of the house tours I’ve published on the blog you’re likely to see this effect.

So how do you go about doing this?

My room seemed straight forward and it was, only very time-consuming.

1 /  I pulled up the commercial carpet (it was seriously disgusting) and had been the Doctors Waiting Room.  Who knows the number of people who had walked over it, hundreds of sick people!  This revealed chipboard (underneath the chipboard was polystyrene for insulation and sound absorption).

2 /  All the carpet was taken to the local recycling centre (I nearly fell into the pit at the tip with one of the strips as it was so heavy, much to the aghast of the woman beside me!).

3 /  The glue removal.  Believe me when I say that NO commercial products out there remove floor glue like white spirit.  I have tried ALL of them to find that simply using steel wool and white spirit works the best.  Section by section I scrubbed every inch of my floor and removed serious amounts of awful thick, sticky, gloppy glue.  I then mopped up the gluey liquid with kitchen towels, keeping it neat and tidy as I went along.

4 /  1st sand.  I used an electric sander with coarse grain paper making sure I didn’t miss an inch of the chipboard floor.  Doing this allows the paint to really stick to the surface.

5 /  The undercoat.  My go to paint is always Dulux and I used their Undercoat Primer which I have used all around my property and it has been fantastic.

Leave for 24 hours.

6 /  2nd sand.

7 / The first coat of floor paint.  I used Blackfriar’s white floor paint with polyurethane.  I have in the past used bog standard floor paint without polyurethane and it has chipped and stained in a matter of months.  An advantage of polyurethane paint over epoxy garage paint is that it is U.V. stable.  This means that it won’t yellow like epoxy does when exposed to small amounts of sunlight over a period of time.  Now I know Scotland isn’t known for it’s tropical weather but when the sun shines here, those rays are strong and can damage paint, flooring and anything in direct light.

Leave for 24 hours.

8 /  3rd sand – as always with coarse grain paper.

9 / The second coat of floor paint.

Leave for 24 hours.

10 /  The 4th sand.

11 / The third coat of floor paint.  I stopped at having four coats in total.  To me I was happy with this, however, the perfectionists amongst us may want another coat – one for the road – so to speak.  However, I had two kids to feed and cooking on the bar-be-que had worn thin!

Let me know your thoughts – any comments below are so welcome!

xx Laura xx

Before

During

After

(Images | Laura Thomas for LTID)

The total cost for this floor?  Around £50.  Yip, that’s all, my time has no price!