We have bought ourselves a house! We decided to buy a doer upper (is that how it's spelled?). A few of my posts will therefore be about this. At first I worried I was deviating from the subject of my blog and then found this article 'At Home with the Georgians' about the Georgians' obsession with home improvement and interior design. Therefore it is actually essential to my blog!
I originally thought my new house had a Minton tiled hallway. It turns out it has a partial one :( but hey ho that's life. I made the most of what I had and set about restoring the adhesive infused tiles and concrete. It took a LONG time, but it is definitely worth it.
The adhesive was difficult to remove. We tried tile cleaner, boiling water and vinegar and found that the most effective was boiling water. It softened the adhesive just enough to scrape it off the tiles with a paint scraper like this one Amazon Stanley Paint Scraper. Then Mr F dealt with concrete using a steel brush, boiling water and elbow grease. It took HOURS so we cancelled our gym membership :)
There were a few holes in the concrete that we filled in. The recipe for concrete is shown below (approach it like an experimental bake). I did not use any tools when filling the hole. HANDS ARE THE BEST TOOL!
RECIPE
Serves as many as you like - just use the same ratio!
- 1 cup water
- 2 cups cement
- 3 cups builder's sand
1. Mix the dry ingredients well in a bucket with a stick/spoon or anything you don't mind getting covered in concrete.
2. Add the water a little at a time until the concrete is 'workable'. Mine looked like porridge (oatmeal) and seemed to work fine.
The last thing we did was paint the concrete and seal the tiles. We used an ordinary white wall paint as a base coat and then a mixture of tile red and terracotta Ronseal Diamond Hard Floor Paint (to match the colour of the tiles). We used HG tile cleaner before sealing with Vitrex Tile Sealer.
Here are the finished results!
Happy Experimenting!
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