On the agenda for today's lunchtime obsession is our floors. If it weren't for the stark unevenness between the floors that were protected by the carpet and those that were not, I would probably say we should just give it good cleaning with mineral spirits to get the carpet pad glue off and be done with it. But the floor boards are continuous throughout the house, and their uneven height (as well as all the paint splatters from careless POs who knew they'd be carpeting and the raised grain in the areas that received a lot of traffic) means a bit of a sanding is ultimately required.
But how do we finish them?!?!? We love the way the antique vertical grain heart pine has aged into the shellac/varnish coating. Lots of rich colors that vary all over. And it's fairly dark (you can see a pic a couple of posts below)...Has anyone out there had any experience finishing floors like this? First and foremost we want to maintain that overall variety of tone, but we'd also love the floors to be somewhat darker amber...
The pics I've seen of floors that just have tung oil seem too light...Maybe they are just so recently finished that they haven't aged enough yet? Should we stain the wood the very lightest color that we see in the floor currently, and let the rest darken? I'd rather not go with shellac, seeing as how we have dogs, cats and kids and that can be a deadly combo on the floors.
I'm just so confused...
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About Me
Just a few of the houseblogs I love...
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4 comments:
I'd think that you'd need to sand everything, and apply a stain to even it out. We haven't done our fir floors yet, but that is our plan. Some parts are darker than others from sun exposure, and old carpets. Our neighbours redid their kitchen floor that was full of holes, and in bad shape, and it looks great. They used a mixture of the sawdust and glue to fill all the holes. We're going to be using Waterlox on our floors, it contains tung oil, you can mix stain right in to it as well.
I was lucky enough to buy my house with the floors already refinished. That said, they vary in color with stains unevenly distributed all over the house. I love them that way. They actually look great.
"Distressed" - it's the new navy! :)
I think we're gonna go with staining the floors the very lightest color that they are now and let the heart of the pine darken as it will...we'll see how it goes. I'm sure it will be "distressed" but lovely!
On our heart pine in the back bedroom I used minwax's natural stain and I really like the way it turned out. We have heart pine in two bedrooms and the hall. The rest of the house is oak.
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