Welcome back to the One Room Challenge.  Redecorating our home has been a lesson to know what you can and cannot change and learning to work with what you have.

This week it’s all about finishing the hardwood floors.  They took on a completely different look once they were sanded and I was so tempted to keep them light and natural!  It made the house look so much brighter!

But once I delved into what it would look like with the sealer on the floors, I realized it wasn’t the look that I was going for in my home.  Our floors are a mixture of red and white oak, but mostly red.  When we put the sealer on to keep them natural, it was too much of a pink tint.  I didn’t want to go from the previous “orange” tint from the aged polyurethane to “pink”.

This is where my lesson came in.  I couldn’t change the fact that my floors were mostly red oak.  So onward to the difficult task of testing different colors.

One Room Challenge – Selecting a Color for Hardwood Floors

This remodeling project was all about change and bringing our house current.  I was excited about the possibility of a driftwood color which I saw in so many magazines.  But once I delved into that, I realized a lot of my furniture just wouldn’t go with it, not to mention it just didn’t fit with our traditional brick colonial exterior including our wood front door.

I decided I should go with a more classic color that will stand the test of time.  So I settled on a medium light brown which is shown on the lower left corner in the picture below.  I had to keep reminding myself that you have to look at the whole picture and know what will work and what won’t work in the house.

As with everything, the color changes with natural light and shadows as you can see in the photos below.  The color almost looks different in each photo yet its all the same.

At first it was very odd to not see our floors shiny.  The satin look is what is in and I decided to go with it.  I’ll admit though I felt they looked more matte than satin.  It’s certainly a different look from what we had.

Here’s a view from our kitchen looking into the great room.

The Return of the Oriental Rugs

We used Bona Traffic, a waterborne wood finish for our floors.  The beauty of this product is that it does not have as strong an odor as the oil based products and it dries much faster.  We only had to stay out of our home for a few nights due to the smell.

The best part was that after seven days, we were able to put our rugs back on the floors.  With an oil based finish, it would have been a month before we could put our rugs on the floors.  I can’t even imagine dragging this process out for a whole month!  Thank you Bona for this newer finish.

Next Week’s One Room Challenge  – Fabric Selections

Next week I will show you each piece of furniture that I have been having re-upholstered and the fabric selection.  The change is so dramatic!

Thanks for following along.  Be sure to visit the other participants in the One Room Challenge for more inspiration.