I painted my porch floor like French tile
Here’s the full story and process of creating my floor mural
One of my personal goals for this year was to do some simple makeovers to neglected areas of our home. At the top of my list was to paint the garage because it has been “touched up” many times over the years by the previous owners and all the paint colors were different. I’ve cringed everytime I noticed it since we moved in in 2017. I really wanted to paint the garage an accent color like a dark brown and while thinking about it, I thought the exterior of the porch could be painted the same to tie it in! Painting the exterior of the porch meant the interior would need a makeover too. We painted the entire exterior of the garage and porch and the interior of the porch the same color - Valspar Deep Earth.
The porch floor for years had been rugged carpet on top of the concrete. It obviously could not stay and when I thought about upgrading the floor, I was imagining brick or a French chateaux style tile. However, my husband and I are not very handy DIY people and what I had in my mind felt expensive and daunting.
But then after a night of getting inspiration on Pinterest for what we could do in the porch, this idea just came to me, kinda like the Lord speaks to me, that I should make the porch floor my canvas and paint a floor mural! It was about midnight when it came to me but I suddenly got a burst of energy and started sketching out ideas. The sketches were loose, gestural, and playful, just like I do my architecture drawings so it all clicked and felt right. I’ve been starting to hang up more and more of my art throughout our home, but this would make a huge impression!
Painting the little diamond shapes where the lines intersected. This whole painting session took me between two to three hours.
So we threw out the ugly carpet, scraped off the glue on the cement, and then painted the floor a light gray cement paint from Valspar. I added a little grit packet to the paint since I was concerned the snow and ice we get in the wintertime here in Michigan would make the floor super slippery if it was just concrete.
Then my canvas was ready! I took some of my black acrylic paint and painted the perimeter first with long, horizontal tile shapes. In front of the two doors, I painted the tile shapes vertically, much like I imagined laying brick if we went that route. Once the perimeter was ready, I used the grout lines as guides to paint diagonal lines that connected across the floor. My lines weren’t perfectly straight and that was fine. My art style is loose, gestural, and imperfect and because of this my art can be very therapeutic for a perfectionist like me.
Where the diagonal lines intersected, I painted little diamond shapes. This whole painting session took me about two to three hours.
“My lines weren’t perfectly straight and that was fine. My art style is loose, gestural, and imperfect and because of this my art can be very therapeutic for a perfectionist like me. ”
Part of why this idea became so exciting to me is that it was something I had never really seen before on a floor and I could imagine it opening up a lot of opportunities for me as an artist. I can visualize similar patterns on rugs, fabric, etc. that would be sold in a home goods store.
It feels so nice to be greeted by something so beautiful and uniquely mine each time I come home! For years I’ve been staring at the ugly carpet (and not to mention the garage with all the different shades of beige) and now I breathe a sigh of relief and just enjoy it.
