Garage floor is stained - Finally!

Last weekend, Bobby and I finally stained our garage floor. We've been wanting to do that for the past two summers now and somehow, it just never happened! The climate has to be within a certain temperature during the staining process. I guess we always came up with some sort of excuse and we would just end up on the golf course!

Before staining the garage, I finally finished up painting the ceiling of the garage. It is the same color as the exterior of the house, but it looks a lot more blue! I also cleaned up the work-table. What a mess!
It looks so much better now!
On Thursday, I started to clear everything off the garage floor. I had to hand-scrub some of the stubborn stains on the floor. And after a few good rinses, the floor was so clean! There was no turning back now!
The first step was to etch the concrete. And gosh, it's amazing how dirty the floor still was! After a few more good rinses, it was good to go.
We had to wait for the floor to dry before staining it the next day. The forecast for the weekend didn't look very good though. But I told Bobby that we were going to stick to the plan! We even bought a space heater to keep the garage floor warm! Like I said before - nothing was going to stop us now!

On Sunday, once the floor temperature was warm enough (as well as in time for Graham's nap), we finally started to stain. That was the easy part. The difficult part was spreading those flakes! Bobby said that it was an art. He was building little cities and countries - as these flakes would pile up high on one another! I, on the other hand, told him that it was all in the wrist. Check out my own technique! :-)
We decided to start from the outside in with the garage door closed because we were anticipating bad weather on Sunday. We had prepped the outside of the garage so the rain would not come into the garage as it dries.
Probably would have been easier if we had the garage door just a little higher!
And probably shouldn't have taped everything down so soon. Sure made touching up a little bit more difficult!
Once the staining was done, Bobby was still quite skeptical about the duct-tape and tarp method on the garage door. Thankfully it held up quite well despite the tornado warning AND earthquake!

And... drumroll... here it is!
A close-up will probably help show what it really looks like:
AWESOME...!!! :-)

And we just can't seem to keep those leaves out! Good thing we have Mommy's little helper:
Graham sure loves that broom!


By the way, the deck stain is holding up really well too! Look at all that water on the surface of the wood!
It has been a busy two weekends but we are so happy with the final results! Moving on to other projects around the house. Never a dull moment! :-)