Floors, Doors & Scores

Yowza, it’s been a while since we updated with a project. It’s been so long, in fact, that we’re now in a completely different season. (Uhh…when did winter happen??) We’ve always been pretty awful at updating regularly, but the biggest reason we’ve been super sporadic lately is because we’ve both been working more. I started a new gig, and Bradley’s taken on some freelance projects. Plus we’re still working on the house every weekend.

We might not update 2 or 3 times a week anymore, but rest assured, we’re still working away. Check out what we did a couple of weeks ago:

Boom. We painted our dining room floors white. Here’s what they looked like before, for comparison:

And here’s what the same corner looked like a year ago:

Major upgrade, amirite?

If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you already know that we painted the floors upstairs black:

We love the black upstairs, but the rooms on the first floor tend to be a bit on the dark side. We decided to go with white to brighten things up. The entire first floor will have white floors, and the second floor will have glossy black. To tie the two floors together and make everything flow seamlessly, we’re going to do a two-tone staircase. Here’s what we’re thinking:

Source: reevesinguam.blogspot.com (found on Pinterest, of course!)

We’ll paint the treads black, and toekick area white. Easy peasy.

We went to our supplier in Brooklyn to pick up a 5 gallon bucket of oil-based glossy white paint:

It didn’t look so white when we opened up the can:

But that was quickly remedied by mixing the paint with a drill outfitted with a mixing attachment:

Mmmph. If that image doesn’t make you crave a latte, you don’t know what’s what.

We followed the same process as when we painted the floors upstairs (you can read all about it here). Our first coat was a mix of 50% paint and 50% paint thinner to encourage the paint to soak into the wood rather than sit on top of it.

Our paint guy told us to do this and we highly recommend it for anyone painting soft pine floors. It helps make the wood harder — less likely to gouge under, say, the claws of an easily excitable 2-year-old doofus:

It doesn’t look like much, but that first coat makes all the difference:

The second coat — undiluted oil paint — went on after a light sanding:

We gave the floor one last sanding and then gave it another coat of undiluted oil paint:

We still need to paint the black metal under the stove, but we won’t get to that for a while. Regardless, we love how it turned out. The dining room’s always been the darkest in the house. The brick wall and rafters make it so much worse. With the white floors, the room feels super bright, even at night with dim mood lighting. We also dig how it adds a crisp, clean feel to a room that has a lot of industrial, raw and gritty elements.

It has all the character and charm you’d expect from 130-year-old floors but it looks a lot less grimy.

While we had the paint can open, we went ahead and took care of a couple of projects we’ve been waiting on for a while. This is some sliding door hardware we snagged from an old building:

The hardware would have ended up in a landfill, but instead, it ended up in our garage. What can we say — reclaimed stuff is our jam. Now that we’re almost done with the dining room, we pulled out the hardware to prep it for installation.

We started by scarping off the remnants of brown paint. Here’s how it looked after a little elbow grease:

And then we gave it a coat of oil-based white paint. We don’t have after pictures yet because we have to give the hardware at least 2 more coats of paint.

We also painted one of the frames we made 3 months ago.

We have plans for that sucker. It needs another coat and then we’ll share a really fun, really cheap DIY project that anyone can do. Super geeked about that one!

Remember this dorktastic magazine Bradley scored at a thrift shop a few months ago?

He matted and put it in one of the frames we made. We haven’t figured out where we’ll hang it yet, but it’s done…3 months after we started. Whee! Gotta love home renovation timelines!

Hope you dig what we’ve done with our dining room floors. We’ll be back to share some built-in cabinets we’ve been working on for the past couple of weekends. Stay tuned!

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