As you can see it’s just like a bright blue crayon, well maybe not as bright as it once was! Now, I’m not knocking this floor. It served us well for many, many years and we would have suffered without it. Although this soft foam flooring served its purpose with giving us some nice cushion under our feet while we painted all day, it didn’t do much to appeal to our visual senses.
This foam floor took YEARS of wear and tear and many occasional “plops” of plaster and paint. It never said a word, just kindly took the beating. I think you would agree we’ve all felt the economic shift from the “good ‘ol days”, but here we are almost six years later and we can say: we weathered the storm—we made it through! We’re creative every day at Faux Masters Studio, so why not do what we do best get creative with our tired old floor? Well, that’s the exact approach we took. Yes, we could have easily replaced it with newer foam tiles, with a newer color. But this floor is a part of our team, too. It’s seen all the painting action from our countless classes. It remembers the “good ol’ days” too. So we felt the best decision was to just revamp it as well. How would we do that? What could we do? As you may know, we sell some pretty fabulous painting products here at Faux Masters, so we went to our Faux Effects product shelf.
A Practical Solution
This wasn’t a tough decision, I went straight to SetCoat. SetCoat is strong enough to bond to concrete, formica, melamine, and countless other difficult surfaces. This is our go-to for all of our base coats since it can be used on walls, furniture, interior and exterior. We wanted a dark grey to blend in with our concrete floors that surround the teaching studio so I mixed a custom color. The beauty of SetCoat, above and beyond its amazing bonding qualities, is the ability to get literally thousands of colors. SetCoat not only comes in the stock tinted colors that you might know and love, but here at Faux Masters we also have a custom tinting machine made just for Faux Effects products that allow us to mix and match to our heart’s content.
Once I got the color I like, we immediately got to cleaning and prepping—the most important part of the job! Notice I did not say the most fun, but oh so necessary! We swept, vacuumed, scrubbed each tile and then cleaned it again by wiping it down with denatured alcohol.
To test it out, I put 2 coats on an extra tile first and let it dry in between coats and thoroughly. I tried taking my finger nail to scrape it back. It wasn’t budging. The nice thing is that the SetCoat was strong enough to bond well but still leave the foam flexible so it would stay soft under our feet.
Once we got it good and clean and free from debris, we got to the fun part! Painting! Yes, I slapped SetCoat right on it! I rolled on 2 liberal coats to make sure the entire surface was sealed and covered.
Once the first coat went on, I let it dry well. Then I went for the second coat. Aren’t the booties cute?
We let this dry well over a weekend to allow it to really bond and cure. When we came in on Monday, we had a beautiful new floor! And no more crayon blue! So there you have it. SetCoat is so much more than just paint. Although this floor is gonna continue to take a beating from us and whatever we throw at it, we know this SetCoat isn’t going anywhere. Go to fauxmasters.com now to read more on SetCoat and how you can use it in your projects!! Here’s a finished shot of our new studio with the new gray floor!
