Dining Room Floor Staining

As alluded to in Thursday evening’s window trim blog post back here, I’ve been ever so diligently working on refinishing our dining room floor.  I must preface this post by mentioning that our current dining room floor situation is temporary.  It’s just old pine boards that were used as sub-flooring.  The dining room floor will eventually be wide pine boards, like what’s upstairs in the old office, but we won’t lay those down until we remodel the living room and the parlor.  Since all three spaces (living room, dining room , and parlor) are open to each other, it made sense to do the flooring all at once for a seamless finish.  Thus, we’re just trying to dress up the dining room floor a little bit “temporarily” which is a very loose term in our personal dictionary.  So here’s the before shot (a close up before shot) of the dining room floor before any shenanigans…I mean…refinishing took place:

I was a little uncertain as to how I wanted to dress it up.  Do I paint it, or stain it, or whitewash it, or just poly it?  Those were all up in the air but the one thing I was certain of was that there would be a stenciling project on top of whatever I chose to cover the floor with.  Since we had a boat load of stain leftover from the desk top project and the upstairs office trim, I spot tested that on a patch of the floor:

Instant love.  So I dove right in and started staining the floor (after sweeping up ridiculous amounts of Goose hair…seriously…how is he not a German No-Haired Pointer?…he should be bald from shedding so much!).  Part way into the staining project, the floor started looking good….real good…so good I started hitting on it and using strange pickup lines like, “Did it hurt?  You know, when you fell from heaven ‘cuz…you’re an angel.”

In my original plan I had intended on spending some serious time sanding out all the imperfections in the floor.  The floor was essentially two toned and was covered in old knots, scuffs, even paint splotches.  Part of me didn’t want to waste my time since it was just going to be a “temporary” fix so I opted out of sanding and I am SOOOOO glad that I went with this decision.  I love all the things that are wrong with the floor.  It adds extra character!

Such a dramatic difference, huh?!  I was in love!  I kept running out to Colby (who was outside working on the deck) and yelling at him to come check out the floor.  Apparently it got old after the sixth of seventh board that I finished staining.  He pretty much ignored me after that but agreed that the transformation was impeccable (my word…not his…he’s not an “impeccable” vocabulary kind of guy).  I even put the still not attached desk top to good use using it as a Goose barrier.

Goose totally would have “helped” me stain given the opportunity.  The floor took me three stinky days of staining to finish the entire floor.  I couldn’t do the whole thing at once since it’s a major thoroughfare in our house linking the kitchen to the parlor to the living room and to the hall.  We needed to keep a path available at all times to connect the kitchen to the rest of the house.  In the end the floor looked like this:

And because I love a good before/after (or more like a before/progress), here’s what the floor looked like just a few days earlier:

Next up, stencil and poly time.  All I have to say, is the floor stencil project has got to be the most amazing project I’ve ever done.  I’m oh so close to done with it so hopefully I’ll be back in a day or two with the final after shot of the dining room floor.

Pssst….How was everyone’s weekend?  Any fun projects get knocked off the ol’ to-do list?  Did anybody refinish a floor?  Or hit on it because it was just too beautiful not to?!  So embarrassing!