LESLIE: Sherry in North Dakota is about to take on a painting project. Tell us what you’re working on.
SHERRY: Well, I have a basement that my kids have kind of defaced with permanent markers.
LESLIE: OK.
SHERRY: It’s cinderblock walls and just a flat, concrete, basement floor. And I would like to get them painted and I’m not really sure exactly what to do so that marker doesn’t bleed through.
LESLIE: OK. And the paint is on the floor and the walls?
SHERRY: Well, the marker is on the walls. They’ve never been painted; they’re just cinderblock walls and …
LESLIE: OK. So it’s raw.
SHERRY: I’m kind of turning it into a game room or a foosball table and pool table will be down there.
LESLIE: And the floor is currently just concrete, correct?
SHERRY: Right, yeah.
LESLIE: Well, you’ve got a couple of options. I mean with the walls, that’s no problem; what you need to get is masonry paint and primer because that’s really what’s meant to stick to those cinderblock walls. And if you go with anything else, it’s just going to peel off just due to the inherent nature of the moisture in those walls. So if you go with a masonry primer and a masonry paint, you shouldn’t have any problem with the bleed-through. As long as you get good coverage with the primer and then your top coat, no problem.
Now with the floor, I mean you’ve got some opportunities here. You can either do some sort of epoxy coating on the floor where you get a painted flooring that might even have like a speckle of sort of color sparkles in there. And that’ll do a nice job of sealing up the floor. You can do a laminate floor, which will give it a little bit more of a warmer, cozy feel to it because you can get laminate that looks like wood. Or you can do tile I mean, which would be one step above. You can even do engineered hardwood. But for a game room – and it sounds like your kids are kind of destructive (chuckles) – you know …
SHERRY: Yes. But well, it was kind of when they were younger but yeah, I – hopefully I never have to worry about this again.
LESLIE: (overlapping voices) Now they’ve simmered down.
SHERRY: But I remember Dad painting the floor and it always wore off so I thought maybe there was something I could do to make it stay on longer.
LESLIE: (overlapping voices) Oh, totally. Well, the epoxy coatings are great. They come in a kit; Rust-Oleum makes one, Behr makes one, QUIKRETE makes one. You’ll find them at your home center. There’s usually like two or three steps involved. The first step is usually a prepper and a cleaner for the floor and then there’s the color and the top coat are usually mixed in one and you can add the color speckles in if you want.
Most of them come in a ton of different colors. They’re easily applicable as long as you do not paint yourself in a corner. But it really does a (Sherry laughs) great job of sealing the floor up and giving it a finished look.
SHERRY: Oh, great. Well, thank you very much. I just caught your show on XM. I’ll be watching for it from now on. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
TOM: You’re very welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT.
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