You know how sometimes you have a plan for a project and get all excited and you do the research and figure out how it can work for you and buy all the stuff and get started and then wonder if it's really going to work out?
This is that kind of project.
But we have learned that lots of times things look worse before they get better. So if you ever find yourself in the middle panicking, just hang in there. Don't ditch - Keep going!
Since we had the wood cut at Lowe's, we were really committed before we even purchased the lumber.
Here is where we left off:
Things were moving right along. Working towards that dream floor.
It just looked a little not like what we had in mind at first.
But we got our groove on.
Brenden and I laid out the boards in a pattern that worked - Remember we had different lengths to work with to give more of random look. Then Hero came behind us and nailed them in with his awesome air nail gun. Totally made this project a piece of cake.
It is a little hard to tell, but we used small pieces of a cereal box for the spacers between the boards. Hardly any space at all - Just enough so you can tell there are individual boards, but not so much that a gallon of milk will pour through.
After nailing everything down, it was time to finish sand. The plywood we bought was a finished plywood, meaning it was pretty smooth the way it was. But it needed a once over - I had visions of my grandkiddos crawling along the floor and getting slivers in their chubby little knees. Not a good vision.
Hero sands with one hand and vacuums with the other at the same time. Really, really cut down on the sawdust flying around.
Ready for the next step!
Looking good Laine. Looking real good. (A reference from the movie, Better Off Dead with John Cusak. Classic eighties movie.)
Stain!
We have a lighter oak floor in the rest of the house so we were trying to stay clear of the "matched" look. It would be pretty much impossible to match it completely, so we made sure it did not even look like we were trying. Hence the 6" wide boards (The oak floor has 2 1/2" wide boards). And we chose a medium-dark stain for the kitchen. Should be a terrific contrast to all the white going on in there.
The thing with working on floors is you get to spend lots of time on your knees. But I have found that it can be a great workout for your butt - Mine was sore the next day.
Look at that!
Okay, maybe the vision will happen.
Wow. All we can say is wow.
After the stain dried (and totally stunk up our house) we are still not done.
Next up is polyurethane.
Visions sure have a lot of steps.
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