These floor boards have caused me so much stress. If after this I never have to think about this 150 square foot span of walking space again, I’ll die a happy lady. I swear this is the last post about floors and I’m keeping it fast. 

After the cork plans burst up into flames, (don’t even get me started) we were feeling pretty low. Hence the months-long gap in writing a blog post about it. As I was chronicling the woe to my family (and everyone within earshot) over my brother’s wedding weekend, my very smart cousin asks, “why don’t you just paint the floor?” Hmmm… I guess, why not?

A quick Pinterest query returned some pretty beautiful photos of painted floors, further cementing that this is definitely the best idea now that our other best ideas fell through. Our contractor was into the idea as well, so all systems point to go.

Fast forward now it’s time to pick a color. How do you decide? Dark grey or white or something else? We decided to wait until the cabinets were in and decide once the kitchen “spoke” to us. 

And, we went back to trying to keep the original wood, looking like wood using a tinted coating and a couple coats of floor polyurethane. Despite every blog and Lowe’s employee’s best judgement we used PolyShades (a MinWax product) on the boards, then put three coats of floor polyurethane on top. 

We did this ourselves and did not have the contractor participate (why is another story for a time when there is more wine in me). They’re not perfect, and definitely are noticeably different than the rest of the wood in the house, but at the end of the day they’re not terrible and really don’t think it’s noticeable unless you know the story and know not to bring it up.