It’s a “faux” hardwood plank floor. For those just now tuning in, last Sunday the hubs and I ripped out the white wall-to-wall carpet in our dining room.
We started our dining room makeover about a month ago for these reasons:
1. We didn’t love the wall paper we inherited from the previous owners.
2. We wanted a dining room that felt more casual not formal, so we would use it more often.
3. We wanted to make a relatively small dining room feel more spacious.
These are all seemingly great reasons to start a makeover- right?
So, here’s where it gets tricky. We have largely different styles, and a fairly small budget for a room redo. From past experience we’ve learned the best way to merge our styles (without any disagreements otherwise known as “arguments”) is to first start on the things that we actually do agree about. Start on areas where neither of us need to compromise what we want. Enter the “faux” wood flooring project.
We both without a doubt hate wall to wall carpet. We especially hated the white wall to wall carpet in our dining room. We both enthusiastically agreed to kick it to the curb. While we would love nothing more than a beautiful new hardwood floor, it just wasn’t in the old budget. So taking a cue from my mom who has beautiful painted sub floors throughout her home, we decided to stain the sub floor. Yes, you are reading this correctly; we stained our dining room sub floor.
You can read about the labor behind all of the prep work here (which included sanding, using wood filler, and of course stain). I used a Miniwax oil-based wood stain in walnut. The staining process was a bit difficult. The areas where I used wood filler didn’t accept the stain the same as the rest of the floor. There is apparently a pre-stain product for oil-based stains that you can use to aid in achieving a more uniform stain, but I didn’t use this. Instead I used a darker stain (jacobean) on the areas where I used wood filler. Then went back over the entire floor with another coat of walnut. Being that this was my first attempt at staining anything, I didn’t realize that you need to stir and sort of keep stirring the stain to keep the pigment from settling at the bottom of the can, so the last (third) coat of stain was the darkest. Even with these little mishaps (lessons learned), I was pleased with the outcome.
After the stain was dry, on a suggestion from the hubs, I used a sharpie and a level/ruler to draw lines on the floor about 6 inches apart to create the look of a plank wood floor.
Then 2 coats of polyurethane. And we ended up with this.
And you can take that to the bank.
Here’s a sneak peek at what’s next in the dining room redo!
That turned out really nice!