Thinking About Wood -Staining Sub-Flooring

picture the beautiful little ballerinas dancing on this!

Recently I was staining a dance floor studio on my hands and knees for a couple of days and it got me literally in touch with wood.  Living here in Italy for so many years I really miss the wood floors of America.  There are wood floors here but they are installed right over hard tile or concrete so there isn’t the air underneath of the subfloor.  Here’s what I love about wood.

It’s warm.  It's alive.

It feels good to walk on.  It is better on the body.

It is easy to stain or paint or change, update whenever you want.

I grew up in a house with an in closed front porch, it was all windows and glass doors at both ends of the house.  The floors my mother painted high gloss white, they were wood, long-wide boards, just heaven.  And with all the muddy running shoes that tracked over them they were actually easy to clean.

I believe a stenciled motif or hand painted design over dark wood or painted floors looks fantastic and as it ages even better.

here's the before

Here is this project at the dance studio.  The point I want to make here is even though it is just sub-flooring, even with the football shapes in certain areas, it still looks great.  It was so easy to do.

i use a big thick natural brush

All I did was brush on a wood stain in a chestnut color 1 to 1 1/2 coats.  I always brush in the direction of the wood grain.

I worked on one project where other workers snapped in the plastic laminate fake wood floors in one weekend.  It was impressive.  The client spend 1600 euros (about $2,000) on supplies, it was a huge two story palazzo.  Her home looked incredible right away.  But it wasn’t wood.  It did not have the same feeling as wood. 

Sometimes I worry that we are filling our homes and lives with plastic.

imagine sub-flooring painted in stripes of gray and white

Maybe painted sub-flooring is better than laminate just because it is still natural.  What do you think?  It is so hard as design oriented people to choose what feels good over what looks good. I saw another project in the country in America where they cut up the sub-flooring in wide width boards and installed them like classic wood floors, painted them all white.  It was a lot of work, yet inexpensive and looked great.

Natalie