If you are our friend/fan on Facebook, you’ve probably seen a few pictures of the new office space we starting renting in Fort Collins. I’ve been a little absent on the web as we’ve been doing some remodeling trying to get it ready for the public, so we thought we’d show you what we’ve been up to… and share with you some of the woes of fixing up an ugly space to something I can deal with.
First off, here it is pre-move-in:
So… it’s a little rugged, you might say. About 5 different floor coverings, some pretty ugly “updates” circa 1980′s and some creative paint choices from the previous tenant (you didn’t even get to see all the different colors the bathroom is decked out in). So, I added a little color and painted one of the big wrap-around walls “Akinz” turquoise. And then the next step I wanted to take was to rip out that nasty brown carpet seen above… which was hiding some nasty brown linoleum on only half of the room (seen below).
That was not a happy site to see. I was so determined at that point that I was going to stain the concrete that I decided to forge ahead (bad idea) with trying to rip up the linoleum. It didn’t come up all in one piece. It left the gooey cardboard part (apparently called mastic) which was a pain to get up. After about 10 collective hours of 2 of us scraping and scratching with probably all the wrong tools, this is how far we had gotten…
We finally went and bought a better scraper system (by this time we’ve probably spent enough at Home Depot to have paid someone to do this for us) and got the rest finished in a less painful 3-4 hours. After that comes the etching. I hadn’t read the bottle before I was ready. It said I needed protective rubber gloves and rubber boots. Considering I was not ready to make another Home Depot trip at this point, here was my solution… make shift moon boots:
Finally though, we have the concrete painted and soon we will be able to move furniture into this room. This may be really unimportant for you, but you don’t even know what kind of victory this is for me:
