Continuing on.....

As you know, we've been working at enhancing our living room floor....   We chose to paint the center area of the floor, leaving the finished wood on the outside of the room alone.

This is not a tutorial, but we took a lot of pictures.   First thing to do was figure out the exact size of the area we would paint.  Getting it precisely the size we wanted was crucial, as you will see.

 Time to put a coat of primer on that old unfinished wood.

 After some drying time, Jenny applied the base coat while the children watched enviously.

 Nothing like a cup of coffee to speed drying time.   Well, that and a wood stove.   Actually, the wood stove speeds the drying time tremendously.   You just crank the stove up as warm as you can stand it in the house and that drying time shrinks quite a bit.

 Ok, here's where the fun starts.   And here's why it's so important for this rectangle to be perfectly square.    It's going to have diamonds in it, and they've got to be perfect!

 Taping the diamonds was sort of tedious.   The tape has to keep jumping from one side of the line to the other.

 Done taping!   The squares with tape in them don't get paint.....   (It's easier than you might think to start painting in the wrong one)

 Time to paint the tape with the base coat.   This ensures (hopefully), that any leaking under the tape is done by the color that's under there anyway.

Checkers!   We're going to play checkers!

 After one coat....   We put several coats of red on, and went to bed.

 After another coat in the morning, it's the moment of truth!  Time to pull up tape.   Yep, we got a little too hurried and put tape on before we should have.   We have a  few boo boo's to fix.

 So, add a little primer on the bad spots, and then a little fine tuning with an artists brush....

 And here we are!   It's going to sit a day or two before we move furniture onto it.   Since it is specifically a floor paint its not supposed to need any finish over it, but it's not as glossy as we thought, so we might end up putting a finish on it to make it a little easier to clean.

That's it for now.   We'll have to try and get a picture up once we have the room arranged again.   We aren't to anxious to move that piano over this paint for a few days at least.   It's time for bed, but let us know what you think!