Let the Floor Staining Commence

It's all done. Finally. It turned about to be a little bigger job than I had initially thought - but mostly due to the fact that we were performing some of the steps without the benefit of powered machinery. All in all, it came out just fantastic. The floor went from the picture at the left to the picture at the bottom of the blog post. The process started way back when we stripped the carpet and cleaned the heck out of the floor - we never were able to strip the carpet glue all up - but it's OK.
The actual staining process began with protecting the walls with plastic. Once that was up, then the staining began. Pretty easy really - just a one gallon garden sprayer with the stain mixture in it. Smooth, even circular sprays of stain went down. We did decide to use a mop to "spread" the stain where it was a little heavy in areas. We let that dry for an hour or so and then came back in with the cleanup.
Now, I should give everyone fair warning - this was the toughest step... by far. We did this using simple cotton mops. I'm not sure how many other options there are for a homeowner (short of buying or renting equipment). This took quite a lot to get the excess stain up. At this point, the stain is dry and you're mopping up dry surface stain... as much as you can with a mop. The idea is to clean until you get "clear" water... quite frankly, we were just shooting for "translucent". After about 5 moppings with hose rinsing the mop after each section, we finally decided we had reached our peak of "translucency" (is that a word?). Anyway, "translucency" equals "exhaustion". So, we stopped and hoped for the best.
We let the floor dry overnight, went to church the next morning, and then came home and proceeded with the step of sweeping the floor until almost every microscopic speck of dust was gone... this may have been overkill.
We then used paint rollers on long handles to "roll" the cement sealant on the floor. One coat, let dry for 2 hrs, then the 2nd coat. That's what really brought the color and sheen to the floor.
We love our new basement floor!