I deplore carpeted dining rooms. They make no sense. So, once day I decided I was never going to vacuum my dining room floor again. I ripped out the carpet and stained the concrete floor under it. It took several weeks and tons of scrubbing, but it looks amazing now that it’s finally done.
Prep! Before I could do anything, I had to remove the carpet, pry up the carpet tack strips, scrub the drywall mud off the cement, and remove all of the carpet adhesive that had soaked into the pores of the concrete. To get the adhesive up took scraping with a blade and then applying caustic chemicals (flooring adhesive remover).
On to the wire brush/bit on my drill! Once I’d removed as much as I could, I resorted to scouring the cement with a wire brush. The floor is about 120 sq. ft. and the brush bit had a diameter of about 1.5 inches, so feel free to do the math on how long it took to scrub.
Finally it was all clean and I could move on to filling the cracks that already existed in the floor. I used a non-sanded colored grout in a syringe to carefully squeeze it down into the cracks and then smooth it out. Once everything was completely dry, I applied light three coats of concrete stain — wearing gloves and working in a swirling circular motion with a lint-free cloth. For each coat I worked from a different side so that if the pattern was somewhat stone-like.
Again — lots of drying thoroughly between coats and before putting the polyurethane floor sealant on. Three light coats of that, too!
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