Paint Stripes on Hardwood Floors - Tuesday Tips

I'm sure by this point most of you have seen the Gentleman's dressing room that Traci Zeller and I designed for the Junior League of Greensboro/Traditional Homes Show House.

Click the Header to read the entire story!

Here is a " before" picture of the same room:

As you can see the floor was not in great shape.  It actually was carpeted and

once we removed the carpet, the floor had a hazy pattern on it from the 

carpet pad.  

 We had Hampton Hardwoods from Greensboro come in to clean and buff

the floors.  They did the best they could to make the floors look good 

 without removing the wax and taking the floors down to the raw wood,

but as you can see, there were still water damaged areas that

could not be fixed where the sink sat and damaged areas in front of the shower

and water closet doors.  The floor coloration was actually two toned.

We contacted Meredith Heron about using one of her fabulous new rugs and thought that would be the answer to our problem.  Her new line was debuting at the April market, so here was still a question of whether the rug would arrive in time for the show house opening, so we borrow a blue overdyed rug from Stark.  It was a beauty but

the size was wrong.  Our little room was basically a square, so the rectangle rug didn't

hide the damaged areas. 

It was just the wrong shape!

There were only solutions at this point.  The show house was opening in

less than a week and we had to fix the floor.  We could paint the floor or order a custom

sized rug.  Paint was the best option.  The more we talked about painting the floor the more

we liked the idea.  Most of the other rooms in the show house were finished by this point, so

we couldn't chance refinishing the floors and having sawdust dirty any of the  finished rooms.  Off to the paint store for paint!  We had used C2 paint  who was an official sponsor for the show house for the trim and doors, so we bought Sherwin Williams Floor and Porch Enamel mixed to match the existing trim color.  The first thing we did was sand the floor, then clena the floors then using painter's tape we marked off the floor in stripes.   I would be lying if I told you it was a meticulously measured situation.  We actually used two paint stir sticks as our distance markers and placed the tape across the floor.  We thought making

the stripes horizontal would broaden the room which it did.   

The white stripes were painted first, all the way across the floor using an 

angled paint brush and a sponge roller brush. 

Once the white stripes dried, then we were able to paint the dark stripes.

After one coat of both colors was applied, we let it dry overnight before

painting the second coat the next day.

The third coat was painted the following day.

We ended up painting three coats of paint on the stripes and didn't put

any finish on top of it.  

We debated adding the green grosgrain ribbon stripe between the larger

 stripes but decided we didn't need it.

Here's a picture of what it would have looked like had we added it.

We were pretty happy with the finial outcome.



One continuous lesson that Traci Zeller and I learned about our show house
was that when something fell apart, it generally came together for the greater good.
We chose to embraced issues and wait to see how things played out, instead of getting upset.  All in all we were very lucky!  If you have any questions about the process
please feel free to ask me.  If you have painted a floor, I would love to hear about it
Send me pictures too if you have any!  I have always loved painted floors.  If you would
like to follow my Pinterest board on painted floors you can see it here! 

Hope you enjoyed learning out our floor!