The Floor

Floor pictures, finally!  A little background: we wanted to tear out the carpet, because it was completely disgusting, but we weren't sure what to do with the floor (and we weren't even sure what was under the carpet).  In the long term, we want to put down wide pine boards as that's what's in the rest of the house.  But we don't have the money or the time right now.  We ended up using milk paint followed by tung oil.  The following briefly describes the process.

Sadly, I don't think I have any of when the utilitarian carpet was down, but just think school corridor or church basement and that's what was on our kitchen floor.  The red part (to the right) was not covered by this carpet.  Thankfully, said carpet was not glued down and the plywood underneath, while painted, was in relatively good condition.  By the way, all the scrapes on the red area are due to the door opening and closing. 

This is after we sanded the whole floor (we brought some furniture back in as we had the floor like this for about a month or so). We used a drum sander and an edger.  It took us about three hours (6 person hours) to sand it down.  We weren't too concerned with getting rid of all of the old paint, because we wanted the finished product to look old and distressed anyway. 

A spinning friend had mentioned the use of milk paints as a floor covering.  It's an old-fashioned paint made from milk and lime.  It comes in powdered form and then you add water.  The colors are all historically based (which is a good thing when we're talking about an 1840's farmhouse).  Unfortunately, not many places sell the true milk paint anymore.  I ordered ours online at The Real Milk Paint Company, but there is also the Old Fashioned Milk Paint Company.  The burnt umber color I ordered was dark upon application.  It dried to a really light color though. 

So this was what the milk paint looked like when wet.  It dried to the point where it was a light cocoa color, and you could see the grain of the plywood beneath. 

I purchased two gallons of PURE Tung oil (NOT the tung oil solvent that you find in hardware stores) from the same place I bought the milk paint.  I then mixed in a solvent in a 50:50 ratio.  We didn't want to polyurethane the floor because it's toxic and it gets such heavy use, which would mean we'd have to sand and repoly the entire floor every so often. Once the solvent in the Tung oil evaporates out, the floor is kid and pet friendly. If we need to touch up, we can, without any prep work.




The instructions said to keep applying coats until it doesn't evaporate off the floor within 20 minutes.  For this particular floor, that meant four coats.

I immediately wiped down the floor with an old rag, and then we tried not to walk on it for two days.  Ideally, one should not walk on the floor for a couple weeks, but really...come on...it's a kitchen floor!  We were careful not to track in (much) dirt, but it's a farm, and we have dogs and a nine year old boy!

We brought down the braided rug that was in our bedroom and put it beneath the table.  It works really well, since our (plywood) cabinets are blue too.






We also had a smaller blue braided rug that we put by the fridge.  And I had a beige runner (which you can sort of see in the background of the picture to the right, which we have between the sink and our chestnut work table.





In a perfect world, I would have waxed the floor after putting the Tung oil on, but it's not a perfect world, and for a confluence of reasons, the floor is not waxed at this moment.  At some point in the summer, I can imagine putting another application of Tung oil down and then waxing it.  But it looks good and seems to be holding up well.   It is going to get wear and tear, but after all, it is just a floor.