DIY Painted Tile Floors

Hello! Before summer break was over, we spent a few days at my parents house. Since I love a good project, my mom offered up their little half bathroom for a floor stencil DIY.

DIY stenciled tile project. A great way to get the look of expensive cement tiles.

Before I tell you all about the bathroom, you can see pictures of a few of their other farmhouse spaces here. They’ve lived in their house for a little over a year and I got to help them with design decisions throughout.

We based the half bathroom design off of this beautiful room by Jenna Sue Design Co.

You can read a full post I did outlining what I’d do and what I’d buy to get this look. After I did that, my mom did a great job pulling the room together. She got the hand towels, the ladder, so many good details all the way down to the champagne colored wall mount facet.

Their floors are sealed concrete. They’re beautiful and easy to care for, but didn’t give us the look of the floor from the inspiration photo. We used this throw rug to help us get pattern on the floor. I honestly didn’t think my parents would be willing to risk their one year old floors to anything more but I was wrong. And it was totally worth the risk. The new floors look awesome!

For this project you’ll need:

this stencil
a small foam roller and tray: I got mine at Walmart.
polyurethane: here’s a link but it was also at Walmart.
paint
painters tape

Our initial thought was to paint the stars white and leave the concrete floors grey. Once I saw the stencil, I thought about painting the stars black. We didn’t have black and since we’re kind of impatient and I get my dislike of spending money from my momma, we decided to use the left over paint from their doors. Sherwin Williams “Urbane Bronze”.

I have never used a stencil for actual decorating purposes. My mom
suggested reading the directions… That’s not how I roll, though. Plus I like to
figure things out on my own so that I can report back to you with my
mistakes. See? That makes me so thoughtful, and helpful…

To prep, my mom had mopped the floors and I swept one more time before I started. I picked what I thought was the center of the open space of the room. Like the center of the space between the front of the toilet and the front of the vanity and then lined it up with the toilet which is center in the room.

Instead of just eye balling it, which I’m really bad about always doing, I checked myself by measuring the distance from the wall to the stencil in each corner, then taped down the stencil with painters tape.

I liked the foam roller and tray. The thing is, you barely need any paint on the roller at all. If there is too much, it will squeeze under the stencil.

Once the paint was on the roller, I barely pressed down and coated the stencil with paint.

As the paint comes off of the roller after a couple swipes, you can press harder but at first, use very light pressure.

As soon as I finished covering the cutouts, I pulled the stencil up for a clean “tile”.

Now this first one was the slowest. I had to give it some time to dry so that I could go from there. The more I had on the floor, the more I could bounce around to find dry spaces for me to continue on. Does that make sense?

Another nice thing is that I didn’t have to wash the stencil much. I didn’t wash it for at least 8 to 10 tiles. After that, the paint on the roller and in the pan started drying out a bit and I had to wash it after, more like, 5 or 6 times.

After I got everything I could fit with a full stencil, I cut the border part of the stencil off. I did as much as I could with the smaller stencil, then cut more off.

I taped the baseboards and stenciled the rest of the big stars and one more little star for the edging.

To work around the toilet, I got as close as I could while bending the stencil up where it wasn’t needed.

The paint wiped right off the toilet. You can see where the paint was a little too thick and made a little bit of a mess in the clean lines. To fix this I used a razor blade and scraped the paint right off of the concrete. That’s a huge plus for not having a coat of paint as the base.

When the floor was done, we let it dry for a few hours. I swept it one more time and gave it a generous coat of polyurethane. You don’t want to make the coat too thick because then you risk the finish looking cloudy. I also made sure to brush it on and smooth it out quickly so that I wouldn’t get brush strokes.

My parents love it and I’m so happy with how it looks.

First of all, I love how the tiles coordinate with the door color. Because the floor has less contrast than if we had used black or white: 1. The pattern was more forgiving. My mistakes aren’t as noticeable. 2. As it ages and chips or fades, it wont be as noticeable either.