Something Wicked....

I'm dreaming about doing something wicked to my floor. 

something maybe-terrible and perhaps sacrilegious...

I really want to paint my hardwood.

I have this crazy desire to make my perfectly good brand new house look like a really old house... I always have.

My husband and I built a really beautiful house previous to our current home and it was really lovely, but I fought with the design of that house hard... I wanted to make it an old rambling farm house... and it really wanted to be a modern, vaulted ceiling showpiece.... it won

But now, I've got this new home that has much more potential for looking like a rustic homestead... it's got more classic features like built in bookcases around the fireplace, definite potential for wainscoting and the cabinetry already looks great painted antique white with galvanized black hardware (the first thing I did when I moved in, which you can read about here) now, I just need to put bead board all the way around the peninsula countertop.

see, pretty cabinets...floor...not so much...

Of course I've got plans to someday swap in a big old apron sink and although it'll never happen I daydream about exposed beams...

But the floors that I originally thought were very orange (in contrast to the formerly burgundy cabinetry) still look very orange to me and everything in the house competes with what's underneath it.
There is an intangible quality of unrest with this floor... I don't know how else to describe it.

Also, it shows EVERYTHING and demands that it be swept up several times a day (which I never do, so I get to hear it whine all the time from my neglect) and commands that I mop it almost as often ( I very rarely do... just to spite it.)

On top of all of this...it isn't real hardwood anyway. It's not laminate, it's just a very thin sheet of brightly stained wood placed upon particle board planks so that it is technically hardwood... but let's face it... if I had a dog; it would die.

(the floor- not the dog)

so all of this makes me roll my eyes just a little when I find websites online that claim that the only way a person could ever want to paint their wooden floor would be if they were (and I quote) "Stark raving mad"


Now, I may be just the left side of nutty... but I take exception to the stark raving bit.

I just can't stop imagining a warm gray soothing and smoothing it's way through our living space. Aging the boards with a sense of lived-in history that we will fake till we make.

The process is a little daunting to get us there, and I have the very tentative support of my husband... and probably no one else.

But he's not crazy about this floor either.

He was very much in love with the honey-oak flooring of our last home and mourned painfully every time it suffered a ding or scratch. He still mentions every once in a while how much he loved that floor. That floor that we bought at an auction and hauled home from almost an hour a way in several trips in our old van. Then we loaded every single one of the giant boxes of planks into our little front room in our trailer; setting the whole mobile home at a slightly shifted angle I'm sure. The room was filled corner to corner up to our waists; you'd open the door and then have to climb up onto the platform of wood we had put in there to enter.
Then painstakingly and with much ordeal, the wood was put down in the house we built, giving every contractor a major headache because of it's small pieces.... but golly it was gorgeous.

See, we're willing to go the distance to get a floor we love... and we both have a deep appreciation for real hardwood floors... I'm just not convinced that's what we're working with here... and me and the floor are having a hard time working together.

Now, I am possibly straddling a very divided fence here (I've looked online and I was shocked at how passionate and adamant the flooring community can be), but for now I'll just close my eyes to the fake orangeness... and dream about pale, calming, grey...

Be gentle...but tell me what you think....