Day 129

Over the weekend, Brock cleaned and stained the floors in the kids' bedrooms. Since those rooms will eventually be carpeted, we thought it would be a good place to try out some new staining techniques. We're pretty happy with the look of the loft floor, but we wanted to try some other options before staining the main level. Sunday's staining experiment turned out to look like a muddy floor that had been mopped up after a flood. Not exactly the look we were going for:

Failed experiment 

So, back to the drawing board. We wanted the floor to be darker, with more black tones. Brock came up with the idea to use charcoal, which is sometimes used in black pigments. Today, he purchased a bag of natural lump charcoal, and experimented with a few application techniques before simply rubbing it into the muddy-looking floors: 

Scrubbing with charcoal

Don't worry; it gets better!

Then he vacuumed it all up, applied the sealer, and here's the final result: 

Completed floor

Bingo! It's exactly what we wanted. We're ready to tackle the main floor, but we're in a time crunch (what else is new?) because we need to finish the floors before the painter arrives on Wednesday.

Mark has making good progress in that huge pile of trim wood, and he's nearly finished with the door trim and the base trim: 

Trim work in loft

You can't tell from the above picture, but Brock scrubbed up the gritty sealer on the loft floor, and re-sealed it. It looks much better now!