Make Your Own Flooring with 1x6 pine

Wood Floors - they're the corner stone of a custom built, beautiful home. As lovely as they may be, doing them on a budget isn't quite so easy, so we figured out how to get great wood floors on a small budget.

This post was shared exactly one year ago today. I still get emails nearly every week about how to do these, if they’ve held up, do I still love them, etc.

The short answer is yes. They have held up amazingly well with lots of daily traffic (and probably not cleaned enough.) I am so glad we choose this method, because I still love the fact that I got exactly what I wanted on an itty bitty budget. At this point I really need to put another coat of poly on them – but they’ll survive until life slows down a bit.

So… without further ado… here’s the post on where we did flooring our way:

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Y'all know I'm not a conventional kinda girl. We've contemplated floors for our kitchen for over a year now. We've gone back and forth about a bajillion times - vinyl floors, prefab floors, peel and stick tiles - we've looked all over the place. But, in the end, we chose something that's not even "truly" flooring. We figured that since we use 1x8 #2 yellow pine for everything else, floors made sense, too! We bought 8 ft planks for about $4 each, which equaled about out to about 75 cents a sq ft, once you add in all the stain and paint. It does not, however, factor in time.

First, Mr. SCC cut all the 8 ft planks into 4 ft pieces, then cut about 6 of those in half again to 2 ft sections. I sanded each board, one by one, top, ends and knocked the sharp edges off the corners for a worn farmhouse feel. (Yes, I did the sanding, hence no photos of that step.)

Next, we staggered the joints, starting with a 2 ft. plank, then the next row started with a 4 ft. plank. (Notice my lovely blue subfloors, which I tried for a bit to live with, just as painted floors.)

We pre-drilled the holes, to prevent splinters and splitting. Then we used wood screws, attaching it straight to the sub-floors. We thought about using pin nails, but decided that the exposed nail heads were our favorite part of old farm house floors.

We used my favorite Minwax Jacobean stain, transforming the yellow pine into a warm brown tone.

As I sealed the floor with Helmspar satin poly (yeah, me again, so no pics), I made sure to fill in the tops of the screw heads to keep them from collecting too much dirt. I suggest 3 coats of poly for durability, letting them dry between each coat according to directions.

I do get one question over and over about them:

Do they cup? No, we've not had any major cupping issues. Wood can cup, and ours have just a tiny bit, but it just makes them look real, ya know?

Real wood farmhouse floors for a fraction of the budget - now that's my kind of flooring.