Painting Floorboards – Cost Effective Means to Update the Look of Your Home

Wooden floorboards are one of the most beautiful features of many classic homes. If you are not able to stain or varnish your floorboards, then a fresh coat of paint should give the rooms in your home a new look. White or an off-white color can give any room a lighter, cleaner look and feel. ‘Wanna be more unique? Then use a brighter color.

There are paints that are specifically manufactured for floor painting. It is best to find one of these since they are developed to endure a huge amount of wear and tear.

Floor paint is wear and tear resistant so you won’t have to worry about heavy foot traffic, peeling, chipping and flaking. Floor paints are also made to resist stains and spills.

Check the floor paint since some require primers and sealers. See the label or the tin can. Apply a primer on the knots, too. Be sure to buy a primer that’s also compatible with your floor paint. Find out which areas need fillers. More often than not, floors have knot holes, huge cracks, scratches and other such issues.

Bring back your floorboards to life by sanding, then polishing and eventually painting them. These could become low maintenance flooring depending on their frequency of use. High traffic areas are, of course, more prone to damage. Those that have light traffic need minimal cleanup.

Painting the floorboards is a low cost answer to making a statement in a room. It is pretty straightforward once you consider the rules –

Assess the Current State of the Floorboards

You might need to sand the floorboards. For consistency, it is best to hire a professional industrial sander especially for heavy sanding.

What You’ll Need

• Brush, pad or roller
• Primer
• Filler
• Floor paint
• Knee pads (needful especially when you’re going to use brush in painting).

Prepare the Floorboards

Begin your painting project by moving the furniture out of the rooms. Allocate ample time for you to finish the task. It isn’t a great idea to paint the floor a bit at a time.

If you see beading or edging all around the edges of your floor, then take them up. You might end up replacing them or sanding them; this all depends on how much worse the edging is.

Always sand wooden flooring before you begin painting – remember this cardinal rule – whether you are dealing with bare, varnished or painted wood. If you want to do the sanding project on your own, then see if you could hire a disc sander. This equipment would spell less elbow grease for you. Smaller floorboards with few issues could do with a hand sander.

For your safety, make sure that no nails are sticking out when you sand the surface.

Next, find out any holes that need to be filled. Ordinary wood filler could be used for this job. Then prime the floorboards and prepare to paint.

Be sure to do the job during the warmer months with very low humidity. Majority of floorboards need at least two paint coats. Raw timber could take more coats.

Let’s Paint

After you have sanded, filled and sealed the floors, you can proceed to do the painting task. Using a paint roller, apply the paint then allow the floors to dry for no less than eight hours. For a more durable paint job, leave the floors overnight. It might be necessary to leave your room till the paint dries or you can hire any commercial dryer.

Lastly, paint the neighboring rooms with colors that come from the same color palette. Link all the rooms in your home to create a flow throughout.

Tags: floor painting, floorboard painting, McCreerys, McCreerys Home Furnishings, painting floorboards

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2016 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Flooring Design, Home Maintenance, Interior Design 101, Interior Design Elements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.