We decided we should re-stain the first floor. We came to this conclusion for a few reasons. One reason was to protect the floor from damage. We've been here 4 years now and I don't really have any before pictures but I feel like the floor has taken a beating. We reasoned the best thing to do is add a coat of stain to it!
The most compelling reason was ever since we have taken down the wall there was a big stain disparity where the wall had been. Where the wall had formerly occupied space the floor was not stained. We tried to stain it to match the existing floor, but no dice :/ It just looked weird and half arsed. Which is not uncommon with us!
Weirdness seen (sort of) in the picture below:
So commenced Operation: Stain the Main Floor!
We decided that'd we stain the floor piece meal. It was not feasible to move all of the furniture out to stain the whole floor in one foul swoop. We decided to do the back section first then the front section. So we took on the highly advanced method of moving all our sh*t to front in as non messy a way as possible.
Our stuff in the front piled up:
Let us get into the nitty gritty details of how we stained the floor. We opted to not sand the floor down because we did not want to deal with the dust it would kick up. We also felt like we could skip the sanding step and it would be just fine because we were not staining it a different color than it already was. We were indeed correct!
We used the stain and poly in one below:
We decided that Chris would do the edge work and I would do the roller to get more area done. He is better with details and I am better with broad strokes so we divided the work up accordingly. So here are some of the photos of us, actually just him in action since I was taking the pics! We only commenced this work once we moved everything, vacuumed thoroughly and swiffer wet-mopped the floor a few times.
Here is Chris doing the edges:
It looks like I'm not doing anything right? Well I actually just stain rolled the whole right side of the floor there!
So here is the completed back side of the room. Looks like sexy chocolate, doesn't it?
We had to leave a small walking path to the front door so we could get in and out of the house (unfortunately we have to leave sometimes). Once the rest of the front floor dried we could stain the walking path and still be able to get to the door to leave without stepping on wet stain. It took some brain power but we did it! The walking path is pictured below in the first pic:
Now with the furniture back and Chris enjoying the sights:
I also forgot to mention another reason for staining the floor. We recently upped our storage on the first floor with an Ikea Expidit 4x4 unit. We already had an Ikea Expedit 2x4 unit, so we came up with the space saving idea of putting the 2x4 on top of the 4x4. Essentially we "ikea-hacked" a 6x4 Expedit unit. Here is what it looks like:
Before letting it soak in I prematurely requested Crit to anchor it to the wall in the middle of the first floor. After we had lived with it in the middle of the room for a bit, I decided (much to Chris' dismay) that I wanted to move it! Having the huge 6x4 in the middle of the room cut the room off short, visually. We reasoned what was the point of knocking the wall down if you are going to visually make it a similar size to what it was with the wall up?
It is a bit of a hassle to un-anchor it from the wall and move it. We figured if we are going to take the effort to un-anchor it, it was an opportune time to re-stain the floor! Here is a pic of what is looked like before:
After we moved the Ikea Expedit and stained the floor:
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