I’ve been asked a few times now about how our basement floors are holding up; I always answer people in the comments, of course, but it seems like it’s probably about time to do an actual official update now that we’re a few months in. But I didn’t want to have a post that’s three sentences long, so I’m tossing a few other things in here, too….either projects I’ve been asked about or just things that I wondered about the long term prospects for back when we did them.

Basement Floors:

Back when I wrote about how we painted our formerly disgusting basement floor, I mentioned that, on the advice of the Sherwin Williams guy who sold us the paint, we skipped the step of etching the floors first, even though the instructions on the paint told us we needed to in all capital letters. So all we did was clean the floor really well (twice!) and then roll the paint on. No primer or top coat and no etching.

Now, five and a half months later, I’m prepared to report that…..the paint is holding up just fine! The only problems with it are places where we dripped paint on it because probably we should have painted the walls first. But I haven’t noticed any chipping or peeling yet. I should point out that this is not a room that gets a ton of traffic. It’s off by itself in the basement; we go there when we want to use the room, but otherwise people aren’t walking through it all the time to get through the house or anything. But the traffic it DOES get is often hordes of tween boys, so….

Anyway, so far, so good with the floors!

Backyard Fire Pit:

This was one of my very first posts, but it’s also, thanks to Pinterest, my most popular one. One thing people ask me about occasionally is whether we regret not putting down some sort of weed blocking layer under the pea gravel. And, yeah, we kind of do. The first summer we had it, we didn’t have much trouble with weeds. But they made up for lost time last summer, and we spent a good bit of time yanking them up. We actually considered moving all the gravel out of the way and putting something under it, in fact. But now I think we’ve settled on just accepting weeding as ordinary fire pit maintenance. We spend a few minutes pulling them up when we know we’re going to be using it, and it’s really not a huge deal. Weeding is also an excellent job for children, so there’s that :). Weeds aside, we still super love our fire pit.

Farmhouse Kitchen Table:

Nobody ever really asks me anything about how the kitchen table we built is doing these days, but there was a whole thread about an issue unique to farmhouse tables in one of my Facebook groups the other day, so I thought I’d talk about that a bit. The question someone posed was, “doesn’t food get stuck in between the planks?”

And the answer, at least in the case of our table, is an emphatic “yes!” It sure does. In fact, we were at a restaurant with farmhouse tables recently, and I noted a disturbing amount of food stuck in the cracks there, too, which made me both happy and sad. Happy because we’re not the only ones and apparently the health department wouldn’t shut our house down if they knew about it. Sad because it’s kind of gross to eat at a table with other people’s old food staring at you like that.

So you can get a knife or a toothpick or whatever and spend a long time cleaning out the crumbs. But you know what’s way more fun? Compressed air. So we do that sometimes.

I’m also planning to send the table elsewhere in the fairly near future, if all goes according to the plan I’ll tell you about soon, so I’m not terribly worried about it right now. But if I had it to do over again, I’d try to figure out a way to build the table so as to eliminate or mitigate the crumb problem.

Anyone have any other burning questions not addressed here? Like, “hey, didn’t you say you were going to actually finish your master bathroom sometime?”