The butterscotch-stained pine floors in the kitchen of the front cabin were looking tired, dirty and dated. Since I had just installed new pine floors in the adjacent room, found here, I decided it was a great time to refinish the floors in the kitchen. But I wanted to spend basically no money, lol. So here is a breakdown of my DIY pine flooring refinishing ON THE CHEAP! Don’t worry, it turns out good.
Here you can see the old 90’s butterscotch-stained pine floors. I’ll admit, they had a certain charm. But I wanted a refresh.
Pine Floor Sanding:
First, I needed to remove the existing floor finish. The easiest way to do that is by sanding. Generally, your best bet is to simply rent a floor sander from a local hardware or big box store. Unfortunately, I’m a bit out in the boons and, I kid you not, could not find one within reasonable distance to rent. Hmm…thankfully, I had my trusty 5″ orbrital sander on hand. I figured sanding would take some time, but it was possible. And it would keep costs low. So I bought a lot of different grades of sanding pads, hooked the sander up to a shop vac and got to work. Just for reference, the kitchen floor area is about 160 square feet.
The photo above is about 2 hours of sanding. Yes, this took TIME to sand off the layers of clear finish and stain. I started with a heavy 50-grit sanding pads to get down to the original pine. Once the finish was up, I went back with lighter grit, 80, 120, and 220 to smooth things out.
Make sure to close off any other rooms before you start sanding! You can see the plastic sheet I hung over the large opening. That helped but wasn’t perfect. Be prepared for dust to get everywhere…
Here’s another progress photo.
You can see these pine floors are rustic. They have “blue” streaks from bark beetles in the pine before it was milled. I’m not sure what’s going on with that one dark board, but I chalked it up to “character.”
You can see the new pine floors in the bedroom meet up with the older kitchen pine at the doorway. I was slightly disappointed that the color of the pine didn’t match, but I guess that makes since as they are very different ages. I’ve since realized that they are different pines as well. The bedroom has white spruce, and I would guess the kitchen is a ponderosa pine as that is more likely to have the blue beetle stain and is more locally-sourced.
Anyway, more sanding!
You can see a belt sander in the photo above. I used that when I felt the orbital sander just wasn’t removing the finish fast enough. It’s a lot easier to sand grooves into the pine with a belt sander, so be careful not be get over-zealous. I eventually move the stove out of the way, but wish I’d done that before I started sanding because it was covered in dust and a pain to clean later. Oh man, the lessons learned!
Ok, finally the sanding is done!
Tung Oil Finish:
I wanted to go with a natural finish and decided to give tung oil a try. The online reviews seemed great. Tung oil is a natural oil from a tung tree that cures as it dries and gives the wood a nice warm, natural finish. That all sounded amazing to me, so I ordered it online with a 50/50 mix with citrus solvent from The Real Milk Paint Co. The solvent helps the oil penetrate into the wood. Also, if you get any scrapes or scuffs in the finish, you can simply apply more tung oil. No need to sand down the finish and start anew. That sounded great to me, so I happily applied it to the newly-sanded floors.
Here is the start of the tung oil finish.
I’ll be honest and say I wasn’t sure I liked how orange the tung oil looked, but for some reason, I thought I needed to see more of the floor finished to decide, lol. Here’s the finished tung oil.
Hmm. Let’s see it looking towards the kitchen cabinets.
What do you think? Ugh. I’ll be honest. I HATED it. Lol. No internal negotiations made it OK. It was splotchy. There was way more contrast with the blue beetle streaks. And, most of all, it was even more orange than when I started. Yikes.
Well. I decided I could either wait for the tung oil to fully cure and then paint over everything (not sure if the paint would stick well), or I could just sand it down again. The good thing about solid wood flooring is that it can take many rounds of sanding. Sanding it was. It’s tough to listen to anything while sanding, so I ended up just singing all the songs in my head very loudly for a very long time. I’ll admit, it was quite therapeutic.
Lighten Pine Flooring:
Where are we going with these floors? After the tung oil fiasco, I wasn’t sure. But the tung oil revealed just how much orange/yellow that these floors still had.
I did some deep dives on Google and found that you can actually lighten wood flooring with a mix of 29% hydrogen peroxide and lye. Nothing could be worse as a flooring finish than what I’d just gone through, so why not try this? Maybe it would help the kitchen pine match the new white pine? I found the 29% hydrogen peroxide at a local hydroponics store, the lye at a local hardware store, and got moving on this chemical adventure. Here are my supplies.
I mixed small batches of one cup water with 1 table spoon lye and one cup hydrogen peroxide in a plastic container. Here’s my janky container!
I applied this lightening mixture with heavy rubber gloves and a white cotton rag, just dripped and rubbed into the pine floors. If you do this, proceed at your own risk! Your floors might turn out differently. Do your own research. Also make sure to ventilate the space well. Use the mix immediately. It doesn’t store well.
Here are the floors after one round of bleaching. Can you tell they are lighter?
I let this dry overnight and decided to give the floors ANOTHER round of lightening. Why not? Here they are after round 2.
They were noticeably lighter, but….the blue streaks were still prominent. And they didn’t match the new white pine floors. Plus I do expect the new pine to yellow somewhat over time. So I let go of my hopes of trying to match the old pine to the new. Here is a photo of where the bleached kitchen pine meets the new office pine.
In the end, I decided to go darker on the kitchen to even out the blue tones. It would have been easier to match both pines with a dark stain, but I love the new white pine and decided to just embrace the different floor colors.
Staining Pine Floors:
Back to the kitchen pine! I tested some stain options in the small section of floor beneath the stove and decided on a combination of one coat Early American and two coats American Walnut.
Here we go! It felt great to finally have a good direction for these floors. Was the whole bleaching process in vain now that they will be stained dark? Well maybe, but we sure did learn a lot.
This is a progress photo during the first coat of stain.
The flooring was looking much better than when I started with the tung oil. Remember how ORANGE that was? So glad to be moving forward.
I applied the stain old-school, by hand with cotton rags and wiped away extra strain with rags after a few minutes. If you’re going to do this, let those rags dry outside, laid flat and spread apart from each other. Otherwise, if you stuff them together in a garage bag they might catch fire. YIKES!
The 2nd coat of stain, American Walnut helped even out the color variations even more.
Then one final coat of American Walnut for good measure.
I love how the color turned out! It’s warm but not orange. Yay, we finally found something that works!
Pine Flooring Finish:
The floors needed a protective finish on top of the stain, so I chose a simple Behr polyurethane in a matte finish, found a my local Home Depot. This is the same finish I used on the office white pine.
Apply the poly finish per the instructions on the can. I wanted maximum durability, so I applied 3 coats with a very light sanding between coats.
Here are the complete DIY refinished pine floors in the kitchen!
That’s me. Can you feel my excitement that these floors are done? So happy! Do you catch that I also painted the countertops? That was an easy, quick project you can check out here.
Oh, let me show you the transition between the different pines.
Kinda cool yeah? I am totally embracing the differences in these pine floors. What do you think?
Project Costs:
Well, this project was a labor of love. It cost in time with alllllll that sanding. But actually monetary costs were quite low.
5″ Orbital Sander: on-hand from prior projects
Hand-held belt sander: on-hand from prior projects
Sanding pads: Approx. $75 – splurged on large packs of various grits, lots of leftover for future projects
Tack cloth: Under $4
1 quart stain in Early American: under $13 did not use all, lots leftover for future projects
1 quart stain in American Walnut: under $14, had some leftover
1 Gallon Matte Polyurethane: Under $58, used this for a lot of projects afterwards
Gel knee pads: under $53 still use regularly for various projects
Other misc. items I had on-hand were cotton rags, blue tape, plastic drop cloths, and a shop vac.
Total Cost: $217 Wow! Granted I had a lot of things already on hand. But it goes to show you that once you get started doing projects, you can do some really great home improvements at very low costs.
Did you like how the floors turned out? Let me know in the comments below.
