We Have Floors! One Room Challenge Week 4

Hi! I'm Amy! If you're new here, I am a mama to 4 wild and crazy boys, a military spouse, and I travel the US making people homes more beautiful. I'm a whirlwind of creativity and it's beauty in chaos pretty much 24/7 around here! I started as a wedding and event coordinator right out of college and transitioned naturally to interiors while wanting to make my house a home on a budget as a young military spouse. Fast forward 15 years later and I am a work from home, homeschooling mama who fills her time renovating our 1980's home with my husband and kiddos by my side!

I never thought I would say this in a million years, but I have red oak flooring and I love it!

After so many issues with our flooring refinishing, we finally got to come back to the house today to see the finished product of our floors being refinished and it was such an amazing sight to see! They look great now, but let me take you back a little...

My contractor told me that I had red oak flooring already and in order to add more to it then refinish all the flooring to match I needed to order red oak flooring in 3 1/4 in thick and 3/4 inch thick. So I did this. WRONG! Learn from my mistakes....make sure the actual flooring expert comes to the house and examines your floors. Don't just take your contractors word for it if he isn't the person actually installing your floors! I ordered unfinished red oak 3 1/4 inch flooring and it was NOT the same as the red oak flooring I already had. Did you know that there are all different grades of hardwood flooring? Yep. You need to also know the exact grade your flooring is, especially if you wan that nice light and bright look to your floors and you want them to match the existing flooring. We had a disaster on our hands. Look at this disaster

So what to do, what to do.... first thing, freak out and stress about the amount of money it's going to take to buy all new flooring, tear up perfectly beautiful flooring, then replace the flooring. Then after your freak out session, try to come up with a solution. I basically didn't sleep researching how to take the red out of red oak. Because as you can see here, my original flooring wasn't as red as what I ordered. It is red oak, but not the same grade of red oak. The original hardwoods almost look like white oak. But I did figure out a pretty amazing solution to get the red out of red oak that I'm going to share with you tomorrow. I'm shocked and should basically be a NASA scientist now because it really looks that amazing. After all of my science experiments and trying random stain blends; going darker, going lighter on stain. I finally decided to have my flooring guy rip out the lighter colored wood and buy more wood to exactly match. And I'm really so, so glad I did that. Look at these floors! I mean, they look identical!

I have so much more to fill you guys in on, but for now just take a look at these beautiful floors and enjoy!

What the winning combo of stain was, we used this pink blocker first on all of the new wood that was red, which is relatively new product. In fact, we first tried bleach and that worked well, but this worked wonderfully. When we first tried it I didn't notice any difference at all but it starts working after a while and works once you add the stain. After the pink blocker, we added Country White stain from Dura Seal and a sealer and then 2 coats of water based poly. I chose water based instead of oil based because oil based tends to yellow over time and when you are going for a more light and bright look like what I wanted, yellowing would not look good for sure!

What do you think of the red oak and how it turned out? I can't wait to fill you all in on all of the other elements going into the kitchen! Cabinets were delayed because of the flooring but they go in in 2 days and then the very next day my counters are getting measured! Can I get a virtual high five?!

Check out some of the other talented designers in this season's One Room Challenge!