Now that the walls are complete and painted, it is time to do the floor in the kids' bathroom. I am trying something new to me - epoxy flooring. Or to be more specific - metallic epoxy flooring. The guy we bought our gameroom couch from told me about the stuff and then I saw it on Pinterest. It is pretty cool looking. So here is a picture of the floor before I started (and before the walls were finished):
The first step is to prime the floor. If there is already another finish on the floor, you might need to grind that off, but we had recently floated the floor and had fresh concrete so we were good to go. Primer for an epoxy floor is really just a starting coat of epoxy. The point of the primer is to seal up the underlying floor. With a porous floor like ours, two coats are recommended. You can use a clear epoxy primer but the black tinted primer highlights the final color better. 
Installing this layer was pretty easy, I just rolled it on with a regular cheap paint roller, as recommended by the guy at the concrete store. However, I think I would recommend against that. The fuzz from the paint roller stuck to the epoxy and created a lot of bumps in the floor. For the second coat I tried stripping the loose fibers off the roller using duck tape. I don't know if it helped or not because there were already so many fibers on the floor. I was worried enough about this that I asked my husband to do a quick hand sand of the floor to knock the ridges down before I did the final coat. Then I cleaned up the dust with denatured alcohol. Each coat was supposed to dry for 24 hours but the first coat was still a little tacky at that point so I let the second cure for over 48 hours. Rolling it was an easy way to apply evenly but maybe next time I would use an old lambswool roller that wouldn't shed. The problem is that you throw away the roller afterwards and the lambswool rollers aren't cheap.
Finally when it was time to do the final coat I got everything ready to go. I mixed 3/4 gallon of the epoxy in a color called Mercury. I had a couple of accents, Pearl and Chestnut that I made out of the last 1/4 gallon. In the end I don't think the Pearl showed up at all and I thought the Chestnut looked too rusty against the silver.
I got all my equipment ready too, I had a squeegee on a broomstick to spread the epoxy and a shower squeegee to do it by hand. Also I had a spray bottle of denatured alcohol to add some effects at the end of the process. I set up an area with lots of plastic to protect the floor, and of course my handy dandy spiked shoes.
So first I "line poured" the silver color in the area I was working, then I poured streams of the accent colors as well. I spread everything first with the large squeegee. Working through the whole room, I did the same thing everywhere. Then I poured all the leftover silver right over the top. Since the coloring in this epoxy is metallic, you can manipulate the look with the direction it is applied. With my spike shoes on, I took the hand squeegee and went around the room making figure 8s. Things didn't look that great right away but the epoxy will settle out and find its own level. Once it had been about 20-30 minutes since application, I went around the room with the denatured alcohol, spritzing and splashing. That is what creates the crater effect that makes you feel like you are on the moon's surface.
The floor needs to cure for a full 48 hours with no foot traffic so I did all this just before leaving the house for a few days. I did wait a little while, based on my experience with bubbles on the countertops. I was able to walk around and pop any bubbles that appeared. They all came up within the first hour or so. There were also a few random spots that the epoxy wanted to pull away from which left a black spot. I don't know what caused this, but I went around with the last bit of epoxy in the bucket and drizzled more in each area. That seemed to take care of the problem.
Here is the dried floor. The concrete guy recommended that I wax it a couple of times which I haven't done yet. I did spill some water on it and it is completely impervious. I have to say, the floor came out pretty cool and it wasn't that difficult. It looks like you will sink into it when you first step into the bathroom! It freaked the dogs out at first. I'm sure after doing a few of these you could get really good and making the effects the way you want them.
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