Stripping gone wrong

There are those times when a girl wonders how she got herself into something. For some it would be a terrible housemate situation, for others a pair of skinny jeans…for me, I was wondering how I got myself into scraping a cement floor whilst donning a partial hazmat suit at 8 PM on a Saturday night.

Pat’s aunt Anne purchased a doggy daycare business and the sale had finally gone through. She was hoping that the lobbies could be repainted over the weekend and the floors stripped. Anyone would agree with her request once seeing the neon green and vibrant blue that was used to cover the space. I said yes to the painting but maybe to the stripping. Typically stripping paint off a floor takes a day, at least if you are lucky, and with those walls needing painted that could create some issues. So I did my research, called a few knowledgeable friends and decided on the best course of action. In my optimistic haze I was hopeful that, come Sunday night, the walls would be painted and one floor stripped.

Friday turned into an unexpected half day of painting ceilings. Saturday morning, bright and early, I went to Home Depot to get my floor stripping supplies. Six containers of Behr’s Cement and Masonry Stripper, respirator, protective gloves, a few brushes, and a scraper were purchased and I promptly started working. The stripping agent should take 4-6 hours to work it’s magic on the painted concrete flooring. An hour and a half later the floor was covered in stripper. I covered it in plastic to keep the gel from evaporating and got right into painting the walls. Easy, aside from the terribly slippery flooring. The floor areas that I checked on seemed to be working as specified. By 2:30 Anne and I were eating lunch and I was happy to get right into scraping the floor. What was described as an easy task started as I had wished. Wrinkled up blue paint peeled right off the floor. I can’t begin to describe my joy at seeing this cause there was about 1000 square feet behind me that was awaiting my scraping. I made it about ten square feet before realizing this was not going to be the case everywhere…or anywhere else, for that matter. Some areas peeled, some acted unaltered, but mostly it was sticky. Four hours passed and I had hardly made a dent in what remained.

By this time it was 7:00 PM, I was covered in sticky blue-ness and Anne asked how things were going. Comically I said something about things not really going. She produced a large scraper from the back. Again I scraped and scraped to no avail. By 8:00 PM Anne was headed home for the day and told me to get home too. Good enough isn’t ever good enough when your shoe sticks to a floor and you feel like you can’t move. Since a project like this can’t really be abandoned pseudo-completed I continued on, scraper in blistered hand. Another hour was all it took to get off anything I could get off without giving myself a hernia, so I called it a day. Almost 14 hours after opening the first bottle of stripper I was leaving, only knowing that it would continue on in the morning.

As expected, Sunday started off much the same way as Saturday ended. I decided to buy a mop to try and wipe away any left over residue. The water only succeeded in making the floor stickier. I was given one helper and then another. Pretty soon the three of us had removed more of the gooey blue funk but still had not completely stripped the floor. We had to call it good enough because furniture was being carted in and assembled. The movers and I avoided each other for the next two hours. As we each did our own thing the incessant noise of pulling a shoe off a sticky floor was a constant reminder of floor stripping gone wrong.