DIY Network

Give Your Floor a Face

Crafter Michele Beschen, creator of the B Original series, explains how to decoupage your way to a new, exciting floor covering.

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	For your next floor treatment, why not create a masterpiece you can walk on. Your work of art is only a few pages and a bucket of paste away!
	Clean your floor and then prime it using a wall-covering primer or sizing product. This will ensure the best and smoothest adhesion. Now you're ready to start pasting.

Here's a way to let your floor have a face

By Michele Beschen

It's been done on books, boxes and furniture ... even the walls. But why isn't it being done on the floor?

What on earth am I writing about, you ask. Decoupaging your way to a new and exciting floor covering. That's right. For your next floor treatment, why not try and create a masterpiece you can walk on. Your work of art is only a few pages and a bucket of paste away.

I did this to my studio space as well as my kitchen floor, and it's absolutely amazing! It's nostalgic, it's inspiring, it's informational, and it's a simple process.

This technique works best on a hard surface such as concrete or linoleum. (You could do it on hardwood, but just keep in mind that if you ever want to go back to the hardwood flooring it will be just like stripping your walls of wallpaper—a lot of work to restore it to it's original state.

Here's how to go about it:

1. For your decoupage material, it's best to use pages that are of the thin paper—at least magazine or newspaper quality. We tried this technique with photos and heavier glossies from books, and they just didn't adhere as smoothly.

2. Pull pages from old magazines, catalogs, cookbooks or instructional magazines. Mine dated anywhere from the '40s to the '70s. Clip ads, how-to articles, etc. How many pages you need will depend on the area you're covering. We opted to keep the edges clean and square as opposed to torn, but we did work with various sizes.

3. Clean your floor and then prime with a wallcovering primer or sizing product. This will ensure the best and smoothest adhesion possible. Let the primer dry according the product's directions.

4. Now you're ready to start pasting. You'll want to use paste designed for "unpasted" wallpaper. Brush an even coat of paste onto the floor that's going to be slightly bigger than your first piece. Place your paper down onto the pasted area, smooth out with your hands or a squeegee and then go over it with a smoothing brush (another wallpapering tool!) Repeat these steps until your floor is covered.

5. We had our pages going every which way, so that the design in the end looked balanced, as opposed to having all the pictures and text running in one direction. But that's just a personal preference. Do it how you like. Don't be discouraged if there are small wrinkles here and there, as it adds to the effect and gives it a slight bit of texture. If done correctly, you won't be able to peel away at the corners with your fingernails.

6. The secret is to take your time and be sure that each piece is entirely pasted. And then, of course, don't walk in the area until the paste is completely dry.

7. It is best to allow your paste to set up overnight so that it's good and dry. And then you're ready to give it three good coats of polyurethane. We wanted our pages to have even more of an aged look, so we used a fast drying oil-based polyurethane in a satin finish. It took away the glaring vibrancy of the pages, darkened it slightly around the edges and gave it that nice, golden shellacked look.

8. To make sure you get the end result you are looking for, I would recommend doing a sample board, gluing a few pages down to a piece of wood and experimenting with different polyurethanes to compare results. You can use water-based varnishes, but if you do you'll want to apply several more coats to protect against the wear and tear a floor normally takes.

Other variations could include using only black and white pages, creating a single color scheme, or a scheme utilizing all the same-sized squares. Or, if you are tired of that old linoleum in the kitchen, why not make a collage of recipes from old cookbooks. No more digging through recipe boxes ... just lift your feet and look down!

My floor has held up beautifully and, believe me, it takes a lot of abuse. Looking at it everyday makes me almost giddy. Hope it does the same for you!

(Michele Beschen is creator of the B Original series for the DIY Network. Contact her at www.couragetocreate.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)

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