The floors in our front living room & the dining room are stained!! Can you believe it? We started Friday night & after working all weekend [until 2am on Saturday] we finally finished them up Sunday morning. & man it felt good! We have yet to seal the flooring, but we will be doing that soon & I’ll be sharing that process with you then. For now I wanted to share our flooring so far & how we got here…

We started by laying 8 inch pine planks in our front living room, dining room, kitchen, & sunroom area [kitchen and sunroom will be stained at a later date]. The lumber was purchased from a local lumber yard here in Michigan [West Michigan Lumber] If you are local I highly recommend them. The planks are simply nailed down to the existing wood floors that were in this house [most of it not salvageable & that’s why we went this route]. We chose pine because we loved how soft it was & that it would wear nicely over time. We love when flooring & furniture can tell a story so a little wearing over time is welcomed. After the pine floors were installed we let them acclimate over a month period where they really darkened in color & that’s exactly what we wanted. We took forever deciding whether we should stain or paint & finally decided to stain, but that was just the beginning of our problems… now what stain color to use? We tested approximently 70 stain colors [exagerating, but a lot] & I finally found Old Barn Milk Paint on Instagram. & WOW! I thought they only carried paint, but to my surprise they offer stain as well & she was so kind to send me a few samples of the stain colors to help me decide what stain to use.

She sent over the color “weathered” & “rustic” & we tested them on some scrap pine boards & placed them in the house to text them against our furniture, wall color, & lighting. We loved them both so much, but after testing the samples in our house we wondered if they were the best choices for our pine boards. The rustic was a little too warm & the weathered was a little too cool for our lighting in our house so decided to do something crazy & see what they would look like if we mixed them together. So we mixed equal parts rustic & weathered together to get the perfect stain color for our cottage style farmhouse & we were obsessed with the outcome! After looking at the sample board with the 50/50 mixture for a few days we were finally ready to lay the stain down in our house & that was this weekends task. Oh what a task it was! We found a good rhythm though & after a while it became easy besides the bruises on my knees and the amount of time it took. Jose would brush on the stain & I came behind him to wipe it off. We had a lot of furniture in both rooms so we would move all the pieces to one side & then after allowing it to dry for a few hours we would switch sides. We listened to many podcasts & had a lot of laughs & a few moments of me being a crazy woman and telling him we weren’t doing it right & the it was going to turn out horrible. In the end… we did it! Our floors are stained & we now feel like experts.. just kidding, but we didn’t mess it up too badly! The color is pretty much everything we wanted.. the one thing I’m struggling with is that it looks different in certain lights & angles, but I think that’s me struggling with change & getting used to having stained floor snow after living in this farmhouse for over a year without it. I’ll be taking some better photos of the spaces soon [these today are just cell phone shots] & hopefully that will give you a better idea of the stain color then.

For now we didn’t seal the floors, but will be doing that in a few weeks [praying that’s an ok decision] but we will most likely be using a sealer from Old Barn Milk Paint as well. We have become obsessed with their products because they have no harsh chemicals & are you ready for this? They are oder free!! There is no scent & we were able to stain the floors without needing ventilation or masks… this stain is a game changer because of that! I was also impressed at how much coverage we got out of the stain as well. Two gallons [because we had to mix the 50/50 mixture to get the stain color] covered the entire front living room & dining room with a ton leftover that will most likely do the entire kitchen & sunroom as well. We thought it would take 6 gallons and it has only taken 2 gallons.. that’s impressive! The whole process went a lot smoother than I expected & I’m loving the floors now. Mind you I’m not great with change so at first I was like “What did we do?!?” but as we live on them longer I am getting used to the awesomeness & warmth of stained floors. What do you think of them so far?? I’ll be back to update you soon on the floors when we are ready to seal them & when we end up staining the kitchen and sunroom once those rooms are ready. Let me know in the comments below, find me on Facebook, & chat with me on Instagram. Can’t wait to hear what you think!