After a grueling 14 hour day the floors are finally installed. I really thought it would only take another 4-5 hours to finish, boy was I wrong! I couldn’t have done it without my mom. It’s so much easier doing jobs like this when you have someone helping you. All the complications that pop up aren’t nearly as overwhelming when you have someone else to run ideas by. I love so much about this floor; first off the cost the wood was only $150 plus another $40 or so for construction adhesive. I don’t know of any other flooring option that I could have purchased for $200 for 450 sqft. It also was relatively easy to install but it could have been 100% easier. I had Home Depot do all my cuts instead of having Dan do it. Which Dan said was a very bad idea, he claimed it’s easy with the big saw they use at HD to get off on the cuts. I didn’t believe him and figured it was my quickest option. Oh boy was he right. The boards were supposed to be 8 inches but they varied from 7.5 to 8.5 inches. Which makes it very hard to lay the floor without getting huge gaps. I wanted small gaps and we used pennies as spacers but if the boards going across the room weren’t the same width than the next row would be off. It added quite a challenge to the project.
Here’s one of those excessively large gaps. I also should have painted the existing floor white before I laid the wood floor. Unless you’re on your hands and knees you don’t really notice and I did try to brush paint into the big cracks when I was whitewashing the floors but it would have been better to paint it white first.
I really like the way the wood looked but it blended too much with the plank wall and I really did want the room to have the overall white feel to it. So I decided to whitewash the floors.Painting floors is super easy and fast, I’ve done it in the basement and it’s really satisfying because of how quick and easy it is. White washing floors on the other hand is not easy or fast. I watered down 1 gallon of primer with 1 gallon of water (which was WAY more paint than I needed) then I rolled it on across 1 board and then I had to get down on my knees with a towel and rub it in until it was all blended. It was long, exhausting and my poor knees were so sore. I couldn’t find our knee pads and kneeling on a towel just wasn’t helping. This part took at least 5 hours and by the end I was ready to die.
It looks chalky in those pics but once it was all done and I put the clear coat on it turned out so pretty. I LOVED the clear coat I used, Bona FloorPoly, it was on clearance at HD so I don’t know if it is being discontinued. It’s water based so it won’t yellow like polyurethane and it didn’t smell bad at all. Plus it was dry in about an hour. It only took about an hour to put a coat down and I didn’t have to be down on my knees so double bonus!
After the first coat dried I decided I needed to do a light sanding on the floors. I really didn’t want to but they felt rough and I knew it would make a huge difference. So I ran to Ace and bought some new knee pads, got my hand sander with 220 grit sandpaper and sanded the entire floor. It went pretty quick, I think it took about an hour and it really did make a huge difference. The floors are buttery smooth now, so much better!
It was a little challenging working around the bed. When we got the bed into the bedroom it had to come up over the roof and in through the sliding doors. So I have two spots where the mattress is overhanging that I need to touch up today.
I’ve started moving some the furniture upstairs and the next job is installing the closet shelving and curtains.
lifes many colors 