After having the Bernina Q24 installed, I realised my crappy sewing room was really just TOO crappy.

For Bernina Northland to install the long arm, I had to removed lots of the furniture to make sure there was enough room for the installers and the machine. Taking that opportunity, I decided to not move back into the room but to paint the “feature” wall another colour. It had been painted maroon about 18 years ago when my son took it over as his bedroom. The room is very dark with a low ceiling and only one window. The dark colour palette really wasn’t helping bounce any light around, that's for sure. So we took audit of the paint we had left in the basement over 30 years of living in this home, and found the paint I had used in the old dining room. Adding a litre of white topcoat and stirring well, I found I had the lovely blue that I thought could help make things feel a lot cleaner and brighter.

Of course, with all such things, when you fix or clean one thing, it just shows up how horrible something else is and, in this case, it became glaring obvious that the current floor just wouldn’t do.

The floor was concrete garage floor covered in chip-board tiles. It had been crappy when we’d moved in and it had only got worse over the years. Now I had been sewing in the room for so long, wearing socks often, I found the floor “grabbed” at my socks as the tiles had lost much of the sealer which had worn away. It was also really hard to sweep, and besides that, looked patchy and discoloured. 

I started painting over the top of it.

I thought if I was lucky, the paint would adhere and I’d have a really cheap solution. Of course, it didn’t. I didn’t have the right kind of paint and as I moved over the floor painting the top coats on the wall, I was scuffing up the paint and it came away from the floor easily. This was beginning to look worse than if I’d done nothing.

I didn’t want to pull up all the tiles. The dust that it would kick up surely wouldn’t be good for the long arm plus we have a reputation for never finishing ambitious projects, so I researched solutions to cover the surface as it was. The most cost effective solution seemed to be carpet tiles, so off to the hardware store we went in search of this $500 solution.

The carpet tiles weren’t as easy to find at the store as I had hoped. We walked up and down the flooring aisles looking for the tiles. I started to look for a sales rep to help me out and when I came back Greg was looking at the laminate flooring solutions that were on display. He asked me what I thought of these and of course they were lovely - but I was sure they were well out of the budget. The more we looked and learned that we could lay these interlocking flooring system right across the existing damaged floor, the more attractive the solution seemed to be. We had quite a large space to cover and there was only one style that had enough in stock for us to use so we purchased the flooring system in “aged oak” for $1,400.

My budget of zero dollars well and truly blown.

But the solution is 50 times better than carpet tiles!! and a gazillion times better than the current situation.