Painted Floor in One Day - My Process

First, the inspiration:

I came across this picture in another blog: http://studioten25.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/painting-the-floor/

I am not sure who originated the herringbone floor but the post was in regards to painted floors in general and I as soon as I saw the herringbone pattern I knew that was what I wanted for my front entry room. Below is my finished floor... minus a few furniture pieces that I am still on the lookout for.

I started by taping off the area with blue painters tape. I lightly sanded the entire area inside the tape. After vacuuming the dust I put two coats of stain for the dark area of the "rug". I used Miniwax Wood Finish in Dark Walnut. You don't want to have the polyurethane combo stain because you need to be able to have your second color paint on easily and that will work out best if the stain sinks into the wood and leaves a dull finish.

This is after the two coats of stain.

Here is where the fun started... I wanted eight equal columns of zig-zag and a simple border made up of simple white lines. I taped around the edge and the area that was inside this border was divided equally by eight. I used a white pencil to draw my lines onto the floor which you can see here in this picture.

The taping of the diagonal lines came next... The flooring boards are exactly two inches wide which made this process easy on the measuring aspect of things... I used one and three quarter inch wide blue tape and it worked out perfectly to use the actual flooring as my guide in placing each blue strip. It is a little difficult to describe but if you look at my placement in the picture below you can see what I did. I used a metal ruler and an exacto knife to cut the strips exactly how I needed them. From this point on I didn't need to measure anymore...this is a huge reason that this project only took one day to plan, tape and apply the white paint. (The two coats of polyurethane added a few more days.)

It was around this point that I realized that this was going to be a tedious project. I also started to have second thoughts as I knew once it was down I better like it because it was going to be there for a while.

Almost done taping...you can see at the bottom of this picture below, to the left of the ruler where the tape looks as though I messed up. This shows how I would run the tape, then tear it off... I would line up the ruler in the seam of the zig-zag and then with an exacto knife I would cut the excess tape off. In this case it would be a cut to the left of the seam.

As I think back to this day, this is where I took a break and joined my family to cut down our Christmas tree. It was Sunday afternoon, December 5th, around 3 o'clock.

Back home and ready to apply the floor paint. I chose Behr Premium Plus Porch and Floor paint. I used flat because my plan was to finish this with a few coats of polyurethane in the end. After spending so much time laying out the tape I definitely felt hesitant to cover it up with paint....

It was time to start peeling the tape off... I had no idea what I would think but for the most part things seemed to be working out as planned.

This picture definitely feels a little electric... not sure how I felt about how it made my eyes bug out a bit... but I figured it would calm down once I put the polyurethane on.

And it did. The shine brought out a lot of character... the stain deepened and the white paint took on an amber feel in places. I was happy with the result.

Here is the view from the staircase.

And from the living room...

And from the kitchen...