Our house is a little red brick post-war home built in the 1950s, but in 1980 it got an addition and a very 70s/80s makeover, complete with a trash compactor, an intercom system throughout the house (very necessary for a 1385 square foot home, right?), and shaggy dark brown carpet in every room. Including the master bathroom.

As soon as we got the key to our new house, the first thing to go was that dark brown carpet. We were left with a paint-splattered particle board floor in half of our bathroom. There were mold spots in parts of it, and it was pitted with nail holes from where the tack strip had been. But anything was better than that nasty brown carpet.

We didn’t have money to re-tile, so for a long time I entertained the notion of coating the whole floor with Kilz primer and then painting it with a pretty faux-tile design. I love, love love paint and the way it makes everything shiny and new. But would it the floor be waterproof and hold up okay if we just painted it? Was that just an amateur solution? I wasn’t sure.

Meanwhile I tried to talk myself into liking some inexpensive Home Depot peel and stick tiles (below) but I just wasn’t feeling the love.

And then I read this post and was surprised to read how well their painted and stenciled floor was holding up. I decided that if professional house bloggers could paint and stencil their subfloor, then so could I.

I didn’t want to step out of the shower onto ugly board even one more day, so one morning while Mark was at work I started the project. (I hope to surprise him with a finished floor that evening—ha! Never underestimate the power of any given house project to take three to five times as long as you think it should. You’d think I would have learned that by now.)

The first order of business was to sand the entire floor with a rough-grit sandpaper to smooth it out as much as possible. But there were still nail holes and random pits, and the huge unsightly crack where the particle boards met. So I spent an hour or two filling in everything with wood putty (in hindsight, I would have just spent $2 more for a bigger tube of wood putty–it’s only $2 and squeezing the putty out of the tiny tube got kind of torturous by the end). Once the putty had dried I sanded the entire floor again, this time with a finer-grit sandpaper. I did my best to set aside my perfectionist tendencies, knowing that this rough particle-board floor could never be completely smooth, but knowing that the paint and stencil would hide a lot of little imperfections.

After a thorough wipe-down, I gave the floor a coat of Kilz 2 Primer, Sealer, & Stainblocker. I love this stuff; we’ve used buckets and buckets of it in every room of our house.

Oh, and that picture below? That’s what our bathroom looked like (strewn with tools and paint supplies) during the week that I tackled this project.

The floor looked so much better after just one coat of primer!

But for good measure (I wanted our bathroom floor to be waterproof and very durable, after all) I rolled on a second coat of Kilz 2. And then I coated the whole floor with two coats of Behr hi-gloss white.

And then the fun part began! For the stenciling I chose a pretty silvery gray called Silver Screen from Home Depot’s Behr line of paint. I chose a hi-gloss sheen for the gray because I wanted the whole thing to harden to a nice durable washable enamel.

Isn’t it beautiful?! Mark and I both lived in Spain for a summer during college, and I am hopelessly in love with all things Spanish Arabic. I wanted a floor pattern that reminded me of the Alhambra, and I found this stencil at Hobby Lobby for $16.99! With my 40% off coupon, it was less than $11!

The trick to getting the pattern even, I found, was to use a foam roller and a really, really thin layer of paint. I barely touched my roller to the paint and rolled it on my paint tray several times before rolling it onto the floor, and that gave the most even application. (I bought a quart of the Silver Screen paint, and the whole project used only about a third of that.)

Most wall and floor stencils, including this one, have little cut-out triangles that you can mark with pencil to know where to line up the stencil for the next section.

It got a little tricky around the edges, like around the heater and behind the door (see above). I was left with some blank spaces and weird corners (see below) where the stencil just couldn’t reach.

So I busted out my craft paintbrushes and painstakingly hand-painted the design into all the edges and corners where the stencil couldn’t reach. This was the most time-consuming part of the entire project; it took two subsequent afternoons.

You can see above how the stencil didn’t go all the way to the edge of the tile. I considered hand-painting the design in, but a) that would have taken another entire afternoon and b) I actually really liked the pretty scalloped design it made. So I left it the way it was.

Even though I had used Kilz 2 and hi-gloss paint (which hardens to a super-durable enamel), I still decided to coat the whole thing with a sealer. The hand-painting was really painstaking, after all, and I was determined that this floor would last a really long time, by darn.

I was just going to use some of the oil-based polyurethane we had left over from refinishing our hardwood floors, but thank goodness I did some internet research first and learned that oil-based poly dries to a yellowish amber color—not exactly the look I was going for on my white and silvery gray floor. So I bought a quart of water-based polyurethane, which dries completely clear, and sealed the whole painted floor with four coats. Crisis averted! Thank you, internet.

And so our bathroom floor was transformed from this…

To this!

It feels so much cleaner and nicer now; I’m not scared to walk on it with bare feet; and you can hardly see where the crack between the boards used to be. Most of all, the gorgeous Granada-inspired design makes me so happy every time I see it!

And, in case you were wondering, I completed this project five weeks ago (as I mentioned before, I’m doing catch-up posts) and it’s been holding up splendidly ever since then!