And now, being completely uneducated in flooring, our floors, and floor colors, it's time to select the wood stain. Harder than I anticipated. May seem minor, but this is actually a huge decision considering the floors of every room in our house (aside from the bathroom) will be coated in this stain. It is going to be in every single room, including the kitchen. That means I'm going to walk on it every single day...sweep it, mop it, drop stuff on it, track mud and grime on it, complain about it being cold and/or dirty and hopefully - have it be my favorite part of the house... yep. this is pretty major.
Because we were unable to talk to flooring guy into preparing a sample for us, we attempted to sample the stains on the flooring ourselves. (Hopefully we didn't do any permanent damage.) Yes, we realize this was likely not an effective test since we don't know how much to sand the floor, how long to leave it on, and we used no finish... but we thought it was still better than winging it and basing the future of our beloved floors on a 2 inch piece of paper (the sample deck).
We had a lot of choices, and considered a lot of these:
But we were able to narrow it down to three choices to attempt our sample. We did a lot of talking and finally decided on these three finalists in a very fair manner. One choice was based on Eric's first selection, the second was by me picking a color... and then...I picked the third color too (ha).
| Early American - Eric's pick - I honestly think he just liked the thought of the name. |
| English Chestnut - my pick - warm brown, the darkest of our options |
| Gunstock - warm reddish tones - my pick and my favorite. Everyone else is scared of the red tones... |
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| Believe it or not, these are actually very different. Early American (left), Gunstock (center), English Chestnut (right). I need a new camera or maybe just a better flash. We finally decided on English Chestnut with a satin (low gloss) finish! Note - my color wins! |
