Flooring Recommendations...

[Karen]

Currently we have a dog room in our basement with a dog door into a fenced yard. We have a platform on casters where the crates sit since the basement floor is unsealed concrete and can be cold. We have doors top and bottom of the basement steps, so we can confine the dogs to their room in the basement while we're at work, and they still have access to the yard, and when we're home we leave the doors open so the dogs are upstairs with us, but can still go out when they want.

We're scheduled to close on our new house the end of October, and will have some time to get things "just right" before we move the dogs in. The new house has a utility sink in the basement that I plan to switch out to a raised grooming tub, and has a walk-out basement with double doors. We plan to build out a dog room again, this time with a 2nd set of double doors to help with the draft from the dog door, and I want to do something with the cement floor, but I'm not sure what.

Seal it? Paint it with garage floor paint? Tile it? The bare cement floor at our current house is nearly impossible to get clean (we'll clean & paint that with garage floor paint once the dogs are moved), so I want to do something that makes mopping it easy, yet I don't want dogs slipping and flying across the floor when it gets wet, but whatever we do has to be virtuallly indestructable.

Any suggestions?

[AzDoggin]

Stained and sealed concrete is hard to beat - as long as you don't have a lot of cracks in the pad., because it will show the cracks.

Check out industrial places like grocery stores, Home Depot, etc. You'll see polished, sealed concrete (sometimes stained, sometimes not). It can be easily wet-mopped and it's indestructable. We have ceramic tile throughout our house - the grout gets nasty. I'd tear it all out and stain/seal it in a heartbeat, but the act of chiseling out the tile will unfortunately damage the pad (take out pockets of concrete). If I had it to do over again, I'd stain and seal the concrete and call it good.

Google "stained concrete" and you'll see the options. It's not all that pricey, either.

[ultracarry]

http://m.concretenetwork.com/research-products/

The best link for information on concrete.

[wems2371]

I have acid etched conrete in 75% + of my house, just not the bedrooms, and I would do it again. We bought the product from SCPUSA.com and applied both the etch and the sealer ourselves. We have somewhere between $500 to $750 in it--can't remember without digging the receipts out. One of the chemicals recommended SCBA per the MSDS, during application, so we borrowed a couple sets from my husband's fire department. It came out really nice for a first try, and I did a decorative wave with circles going from the living room to the kitchen, with the grinder and grout, and swapped colors. You can even make it look like tile, if you choose to go through all that work and have grout lines. The only thing that has damaged it in almost 8 years, is our office chair wheels. So we'll need to spot check some sealer there and use rugs. I think we probably went a little light on the sealer though too, in trying to not run out. If I'm home a lot during the winter months, I tend to wear flip flips/slippers sometimes. It can get a little rough on the feet, walking on a hard surface day in and day out.

[Ruffshooter]

You can use Epoxy pourable/spreadable flooring with the anti-slip grit, It is still very washable and durable can get in different colors can bring it up the wall a bit to make a base which will help keep the water away from the framing and drywall.

If you do a the epoxy or stained concrete, you will want to pressure was the floor first or scrub it clean, then use baking soda (Opens up the pours so the stain or paint will bond better) and water and brush that in with a stiff brush, then rinse that fully clean so no residue then use your stain or paints as recommended by the manufacturer.