CIH One Room Challenge Guest/Boys Bedroom

October 26, 2017Noni

Week 4

Welcome back to my CIH One Room Challenge Guest/Boys Bedroom! You can check out Week 2 here and Week 3 here and check out all the other guest participants here

Things are coming along nicely! This week we are going to talk about the floors. This was the biggest job so sorry if this is long post. So we were confused why someone would put that stick on linoleum over a perfectly great wood floor, but we are just going to assume they had a really good reason, or that maybe they were from Mars, you decide. We pulled it all off, the glue was a bugger to get off and it took alot of tries and a very long time to get it non sticky. Once it was all off, Levi sanded it with a hand sander. We then decided that we wanted to lighten the floors even if it was temporary because once we get on the kitchen we are going to redo all the floors at the same time. So it was actually great practice. Levi went to the Home Depot and rented a big sander and varying sandpaper grits. I don’t have pictures, but it took a lot of sanding!

Here is a before of the floor:

Yeah, not my most favorite color. It looked pretty great once everything was sanded off and no stain on it but we knew it couldn’t stay looking like that. We tried just sealing it but it turned it pink. I looked on Pinterest and couldn’t really find what I was looking for. Yes, there is alot out there including Lye that we considered, but again, we need to redo it later and don’t want it to be too hard. I decided that this white wash would work pretty well even though it says its not for floors. I was pretty nervous about the high maintenance technique, because even though its temporary, I didn’t want it streaky.

So the technique we did is I brushed it on a small space and Levi came right behind me and wiped it off with a rag and blended it in so that there wouldn’t be areas that ran together or look streaky. We had to work really fast before it dried at all. It is water based so it made it pretty easy and it didn’t smell bad at all. I love the way it still looks natural and lighter and not too pink or orange hued.

So here is where it got tricky as far as what to seal it with. We knew that we didn’t want a hardcore sealer on it since we will be redoing them later and don’t want it to be that hard to redo. Levi asked a painter friend what to use and he suggested this polycyrlic, but we knew that this water based polycrylic isn’t really intended for floors. We ended up doing 4 coats and it is still a really thin layer which doesn’t offer alot of protection. But I sure love the look of it.

Its crazy how it looks different in each picture, they were just at different times of day. Like I said, I’m not sure if you would want to use water based polycrylic on wood floors, but for now this works for us and I’m curious to know how it would work if we did more coats. I can’t recommend this way of doing floors because that’s not what these products are for but for any other project, I absolutely love them both and use them all the time.

Here is a nice fall shot, just for fun.