Hindsight is 20/20

Dustin and I thought and thought and thought about what to do with the plywood flooring we have laid. Our plan all along has been to paint it. That's why we left a 1/16 inch gap between the boards-- we wanted you to be able to TELL that it was planks and not solid flooring.

Then, people started looking at it as we worked. Everyone who saw it said to stain it. So, we decided to stain it to see what it looked like before we made the final decision. Once you paint, there's no turning back. We though we'd give staining it a shot. (And, we only used 2 quarts that were $9.99 each)

Can you believe that this started as this? It has been a lot of work, but it is worth it! We never expected it to look GOOD, haha. We thought we would want to cover it up all along. Boy, we were wrong.

Yesterday, we hand stained the entire 533 sq ft of this room. It took about 4 and a half hours.

My motto is "work smarter not harder". I threw that out the window with stain fumes on this project, apparently. :)

Had we known that we were going to stain rather than paint, we would have done it with the plywood on sawhorses and in 17 nice big sheets rather than in 136 strips that were nailed to the floor... and we wouldn't have left a gap. We also wouldn't have purchase $50 worth of paint for the floor.  oh, hindsight :) Hopefully the paint we bought for the floor isn't too dark for the hallway walls, I might try to use one of the two gallons there- eventually.

Dustin is starting the poly process today and will finish it tonight or early in the morning. We are going to try to do 4 coats. Hopefully we have enough!

The plan is to shut off the room and the upstairs and crack open all the windows tonight. He'll have a fire blazing to help keep the temperature up while it dries too (yes, poly is flammable, but it's a wood stove just off the garage below that vents straight into that room :)). Meanwhile, we plan to camp out in the living room downstairs to escape the fumes and the chilliness that's going to be upstairs!

If we can't stand it, my mom might get a midnight sleepover with two cats who hate each other (and hate her cats), a needy beagle, and us!

I go back to the acupuncturist later today too. He'll be glad when our renovation project is over :) Although we wear masks, every week he notices that I still have a lot of "dampness" and irritation in my lungs. Part of that is hereditary. My whole family has a chronic cough/throat clearing issue. But, I know that a lot of it is from us doing projects like this trying to make our house cleaner and less 'carpety'. In the long run, it will be worth it, but I wish it wasn't so messy along the way!

**Update** We definitely couldn't sleep here last night so at midnight we packed up both cats (Mom had already came to get Ellie) and headed to Mom's to sleep in the fresh air. It is also drying pretty slowly, so he's only able to re-coat every 8 hours.  Layer 3 is getting applied now. Hopefully layer 4 happens later today. Then, it is just a waiting game for it to dry and cure. Here's to some extra patience :)

*Also, since this is 100% trial and error, I will be posting more of a tutorial once we are complete done. For now, I'll just stick with the handful of pics here and there :) The tutorial, along with a list of items, where we got it all, and the cost, will be posted on December 15.