Would You Like Some Buffalo Wings with That?

Oil going down. Maybe it'll lighten?

Things don't always go so smoothly. For several months we'd planned to use oil on the floors. Apparently it's a very European thing to do, and after a lot of research we were sold.

In our last house I still remember the gut-punch I felt after sliding the refrigerator in place and seeing a three foot long

Why's it so red?!?

scratch in the new polyurethane finish. One of the major advantages of using an oil finish is that the oil seeps into the wood so scratches and wear will hardly show.

With our crazy ones, that was a big advantage. We ordered some samples from Europe and used our scraps of floor to choose our color. The problem was that it didn't go down nearly the same color as our samples.

Let's sand this off!

It was sooo red. It made the family room feel like a TGI Fridays bar.

Break out the drum sander. This floor was way too much work for us to not love it. We're going back to the old reliable stain options.

Summer is Over.

First day of school! The kids were ready. The parents were ready. We'll see if their 3rd and 6th grade teachers are ready.

Floor is Down

Very early in looking into design options for this house we were drawn to putting in chevron floors. That pretty much led to all the other considerations. I was a little apprehensive since it's obvious that if you get out of whack at all, it can mess up the whole floor.

So for this floor we decided to do it differently. We went with a character grade solid walnut. We set up a "stop" outside to cut each piece to the same size and we pre-install sanded each edge of each piece with a belt sander. We used a combination of floor urethane glue and standard flooring staples to put it down, and the pattern was very tedious. I'll admit that a few rows went in and had to come back out so we could make minor tweaks.

We're really excited about it, and neighbors who have heard about it have already had to stop by to see it. It was a lot of work, but it's super unique and turned out just how we were hoping. We were sure we were going to be short on wood, but finished the install with literally a just few square feet left.