Flooring- If At First You Don’t Succeed…

Hello!

  Today I wanted to share one of those projects that didn’t end up working out, my flooring.  When I first started looking for a floor for the great room, I knew I wasn’t going to find an easy option.  I wanted it to be real wood because I just can’t stand the sound of dog toenails on laminate.  I didn’t want the long lines of traditional plank flooring because the room is an octagon and there aren’t two main elements that are opposite each other for the lines to connect.  

So I searched high and low, and eventually I settled on wood tiles.  There were lots of advantages to using them; you can cut them yourself so they are fairly inexpensive, they are very strong (like a butcher block) and they have an old world feel, since there are still some European cities which have wood tile streets which have been around for centuries. 

We ran into a few issues.  6×6” tiles would have been the easiest to work with, but we couldn’t find a saw that could make them with one cut.  So then we switched to 4×6” tiles.  The problem there was that rectangular tiles are usually laid out like a brick wall so we were back to long lines.  Finally we settled on a herringbone pattern.  So we were good up to that point. 

Then came the excruciating process of trying to find the right color.  The only wood we could get around here that wasn’t super expensive was Douglas Fir, which is notorious for being blotchy when stained and has a strong orange color to it.  I had imagined a dark brown floor, but I didn’t want to be super picky so I just said that I didn’t want the bright orange to show because it clashed with the bedroom walls, and I didn’t want the grain lines to be dramatically different in color from the rest of the tiles because it gave an optical illusion look and hurt my eyes. 

Well, after trying more than thirty stains, dyes, glazes, and combinations, I can say pretty definitively that end grain Doug Fir doesn’t stain.  I tried light browns, dark browns, and blacks.  They all stained the soft parts very dark and the cores not at all.  I tried grays.  I tried greens.  I tried no stain, just a sealant (that just darkened the cores and made everything bright orange.  I tried oil based stains, water based stains, gel stains (even though they aren’t for floors), glazes, watered down paints, and even black walnut dye.  Nothing worked.  After months and months of trying, I was ready to give up.  I know I got pictures of all of these attempts, but I can’t seem to find them.  The only picture that turned up was a sample board on the burn pile.  Obviously I was frustrated!

Then my dad suggested redwood.  I don’t know why we didn’t try it before.   He went to a local redwood dealer and got a few samples.  I stained them with a few different colors and they all looked great.  I was so excited!  I picked my favorite and Dad went back to get a few more tiles so we could try a bigger sample of the color we liked.  It looked completely different the second time.  The first was a lovely warn reddish brown, just like old oak leaves.  The second was so dark it was almost black.  Weird!  Marcus pointed out that one sample seemed to be young wood and one was old growth (the age lines rings were tight one the first and wide apart on the second).  We asked if we could get all one age of wood, and how much the board would cost and the guy said he’d get back to us.  We waited, and waited.  Dad started checking with him every two or three days either in person or on the phone, and he always assured us that he’d have an answer soon.  This went on for weeks before we gave up.  He never did get back to us with pricing.  Talk about crummy customer service! 

So we were back to trying to make the Doug Fir work.  Finally I decided that maybe I could just paint the whole thing and that we might be able to still see the grainlines and the herringbone pattern through the paint.  So we went ahead and put in the fir end grain tiles in the little utility room.  We used ¾” tiles, sanded around the edges and glued them down with a wood floor mastic. 

We filled in the big gaps (mostly around the rounded corners) with a both a commercial wood filler and one made from shellac and sawdust as recommended for wood tiles.  We rented a sander and my Dad spent over 3 hours sanding a 40 square foot room. 

I bought a floor enamel paint matching the color to the tiles I’m using on the turret floor and for window sills around the house (Tiki Hut by Sherwin Williams).  I gave it one good coat of paint, rolled on, with particular attention to the cracks.  The woodgrain still showed and the herringbone pattern was evident, but it was just kind of “blah” overall. 

Not worth all the work it took.  All those house cutting and sanding tiles.  All that time on hands and knees gluing them down and filling in around them.  An average of 5 minutes per square foot (that would be over 60 hours for the rest of the floor we were planning to lay).  So I officially gave up on my dream of having wood tile floors.  It’s hard, but sometimes things just don’t work out no matter how hard you try.  Now I’ve seen some pictures of beautiful wood tile floors on the internet, so I know it’s possible, but it didn’t work out for me.  So, after over a year of trying to make it work,  it was back to the drawing board.  Luckily, my Mom found something that will work beautifully, and I might like the look of it even better.  Stay tuned for the next chapter in the flooring saga.  Here’s a sneak peak!

Best,

Fiona