OT: Wood floors, concrete acid staining, etc.

[llcoddington]

WE BOUGHT A HOUSE! We close on Sept. 30th! Ok, this is huge news in our family! We thought about moving to North Carolina and then we thought about moving to Upstate NY and renovating DH's childhood home and then we thought about buying another home in NY and then we decided that we love where we live and will just stay here!

So, a few questions:

1. Our house has finished wood floors on the main level. What is the best way to clean wood floors? It's a fairly large area.

2. Has anyone done or had done for them concrete acid staining? We are pulling up the carpet in the basement (DH has cat allergies- another post on that!) and want to do something different. This looks SO COOL! But, how practical is it? And how expensive? I've read as little as $2 per square foot up to $15. What does $2 get you? We are going to call around but I thought I would ask here first!http://www.concretenetwork.com/concrete/acid_etch_staining/previewfloorstains.html

Lana
mommy to Lauren 12/5/03

[miki]

I feel like we have acres of wood floors on some days. I just bought a Eureka cordless vacuum to pick up dog hair and crumbs. Works great! It's essentially like a dustbuster on a stick you can push around. I do that pretty often. Then use Murphy's Oil soap and a mop, maybe a couple times a month.

No experience with the concrete staining. But I did see art-sy concrete floors in this converted firehouse that DH and I considered buying. The owner was a photographer. What he did was use a mop and applied paint to the concrete floors and then put a sealer on top of that. For his studio area, he skipped the paint and just sealed the floors. If he did not tell us that he did it himself, I would have gone away thinking he hired people to do it.

Good luck with the house--exciting stuff!

[mamicka]

Lana... Congratulations on your house! I know how exciting that is - you're going to have so much fun.

1. We clean our wood floors with Bona cleaner - here's the link. http://www.bonakemi.com/consumers/hardwoodfloorcare.html Lots of companies have similar products, this is just the one that's sold at our local grocery store. If DS has a particularly messy day, I might mop with the Rosemary Method cleaner or Murphys, but that's maybe once a month.

2. I don't know much about the concrete etching but I agree that it's beautiful. My sister has it in most of her house in CA... I haven't seen it yet but she really loves it. It was done by the previous owners so I don't know about $$ but its supposed to look like marble. I would consider it for our basement but we have too many potential foundation issues in this area for it to be worth it.

Good luck & congrats again!
Allison