Kitchen Floor (After-ish)

Please pardon the tardiness of this post but I said I was going to wait to post pictures until we had finished staining and put the poly on and boy, am I glad we did. It looks fantastic. I'm really thrilled with the results. I could stare at it all day. Let's start at the beginning.

We pulled up a couple of layers of linoleum, scraped off the black junk...

Sanded as best we could

Then we stained and stained and polyurethaned!

A little bit about the stain: we got two quarts of Minwax Dark Walnut and applied it using some old rags.

We would do a little, stop, wait for it to dry, wipe the excess and then do a little more so that we didn't get so far away from our original spot we couldn't go back and wipe the excess off. That was Conan's suggestion and that's why I pay him the big bucks. Well, that and the pictures. He takes really nice pictures. And he's a great cook. And the list goes on and on. But I digress.

It took about two hours to do the entire floor and we used a quart on that first coat.

Those are my mom's feet btw. If they were my feet you'd know it cuz' they'd be taking up about half the picture. The little feet gene skipped a generation apparently : (

On Friday afternoon the floor was still a little tacky but I decided to go ahead and put a second coat on anyway. No pictures of this step because I was working alone that day.

It stayed pretty tacky on Saturday and Sunday so we decided to sit around and twiddle our thumbs until it could at least be walked on without sticking to our shoes. Yesterday it was dry enough for polyurethane so we got a gallon of Minwax Fast Drying Semi-Gloss and some lamb's wool pads for application. They come on a little wooden block that you screw to the end of your broom handle. Much easier than hands and knees. Kind of like the stain, we did a little at a time with me on the floor wiping up foot prints before we put the polyurethane down. The results speak for themselves I think.

Again, I can't say how happy I am with how this turned out. It's just...there are no words. Aside from the inconvenience of not having a stove to cook on and having to go through the living room, onto the back porch and into the laundry room to get to the fridge it's been a relatively easy process. They're still a little tacky under the cabinets so we're going to start another project (I know!) while we wait for the floors to dry completely. Betcha' can't guess what it is!