Decorate Your Wooden Floors

Natural flooring is so popular now. As people remove their dust-filled carpets and go for a fresher look throughout their homes. But caring for wooden floors takes a lot more attention than having a carpet that you can just run the vacuum cleaner over.

Wooden and natural flooring make a room feel so much bigger than it is. Also, if you have someone suffering from asthma in the house, they will find some relief when you get rid of the carpets and just go for the natural look. In this article, we wanted to share some advice on the right way for caring for wooden flooring. As well as advice on laying new flooring.

Prepare Your Wooden Floors

Whatever you are doing with your wooden floors, they need to be checked over and prepared correctly. otherwise all your hard work, later on, will be for nothing. Normally when you lift a carpet, the floorboards underneath will be a mess.

When you lift your carpets up, you need to check the floorboards. If you have creaking floorboards, it means a floorboard is loose. Secure these floorboards with nails, making sure they are completely secured into the wood. Any nails that are not completely in the wood flooring can injure you as you walk barefoot over it. It can also damage your sander when you sand the floor. Check the rest of the floor for any nails that are sticking out of the flooring, they will all need banging into the floor.

There will be paint on them, from where people before you have decorated the walls. They will also be discoloured, so they need to be sanded down. You can hire an electric sander to get the job done more quickly and easily. Or you can use a smaller home sander. To start sanding the floor, you need to use a course and abrasive sandpaper. Then work the sander at a 45-degree angle on the floorboards. When the paint and stains are sanded away, start using medium or fine sandpaper and sand in the direction of the floorboards.

Use a scraper to remove old paint or varnish from the area that is hard to get to, like around pipes. Then sand it off by hand with some sandpaper.

Painting, Staining And Varnishing Your Wooden Floors

Varnishing your freshly stripped floors will give a lovely and new look to your flooring. But painting them is just as fun and homely looking too.

Painting

Painting them white will make your room look so much bigger, but it is not ideal if you have a family. The painting also takes longer to cover the flooring because you need to prime, undercoat and then paint the floor with your chosen floor paint. The paint needs to be hardwearing and wipeable. So make sure you use specific floor paint to paint the floorboards.

Staining

Staining your floors might be preferable to you, instead of using a coloured varnish. To apply the stain, you use a cloth and work the stain along the grain. Do not use too much stain in one go, as it will be darker in some places than in others. So use it sparingly and leave it to dry. Then apply at least three layers of completely clear varnish to seal the surface and protect the flooring. If you want to stain hardboard flooring, that can be easy to do as well in the same way.

Varnishing

Varnishing the floors is popular with some people decorating their homes. Before you start, you need to make sure the room is well-ventilated and that you sweep all of the dirt and dust away. When the floor has been prepared, you take your varnish of choice and paint the varnish onto the floor with a brush. Brush the varnish in the direction of the grain, and make sure you don’t miss any spots. It helps if you can move around the room after you have varnished an area. Then look at the floor from different angles to see if you have missed a spot. You need to apply about 3 coats of varnish to protect your flooring.

When you have finished your flooring, it will look amazing and give some originality back to the house. You don’t need to even have floorboards to have a natural finish like this. Even if your house has hardboard flooring, you can paint or varnish it for a different look. If you have any ideas to add, please drop them in the comments below.