The Day The Floor Was Purple

Yesterday I explained that I was trying to use up some of my excessive paint stash with this attic room project.  Once the walls were painted, I needed to figure out what to do with the floors.

Again, we were back to the whole “to paint or not to paint?” issue.

I personally love these old wood floors.

If this were one of those home decor shows, now would be the scene where someone walks in with a giant sander and in 30 seconds, the floor becomes drop dead gorgeous!…

But, let me give you a bit of history on this particular floor.

We’ve been told (by someone with good authority) that these floors aren’t hardwood floors like we think of today.  Instead, in 1927 when this room was built, these boards were actually the sub-floor.  Today, plywood is used for that.

Since it was just meant to be a subfloor, there are large gapes between the boards.

The boards are also very rough.  Those facts, however, didn’t detour me from contemplating refinishing them anyway.

I didn’t contemplate for long.  My husband’s answer to that idea was a quick and firm negative.

In fact, he wanted to install plywood over it.  Yikes!!

Thankfully, a few well-placed screws seemed to fix a lot of squeaks and spongy spots in the floor and he agreed to giving it a paint treatment.   Remember how I mentioned how important it was not to substitute an old sheet instead of a dropcloth??  Here’s how I know…

My nightmarish painting the ceiling experience left the floor like this.  It had now gone from bad to worse.  I decided that I’d like to try to match the dark color of the original floor (like on the left of the picture).  I even had the perfect color ~ “Panther” from General Paint.  Again, however, I didn’t have enough to cover the whole floor twice.

So, I did something very, very scary.  I mixed some deep red and blue (colors from our other house).

A quick computer search told me it would end up purple.  It did.  And it covered the poor spotted floor beautifully.

Now don’t panic.  It doesn’t stay purple…  {I’ll tell the rest of the story tomorrow.}

But, I have to admit,

I actually kind of liked it…

{And now, some “technical” information.  Some of the floor boards were completely raw wood.  I primed those with oil-based primer, since I already had it out.  The other boards had been stained with oil-based stain.  If there had been a shiny finish, it was already worn off.  The old stain had sealed and prepped the wood, so I just went over it all with the latex paint.  It worked wonderfully.}