Heartbreak

As my last post was titled “love” this one can only be called “heartbreak”. After all the clicking into place of things at the butcher shop, I hit my first real speed bump. More like whatever would make you angrier than hitting a speed bump. The floors! The dumb floors. My fingers crossed clearly did nothing to help us with the colour of the floors. A refresher on the saga of the floor.

We started with maple-very short planks (too short!) but nice overall quality:

We wanted them to look like the Lawrence floors which are painted russian ply:

I was really on the fence about straight up painting the butcher shop floor. For one, it is way better quality wood than at the restaurant. When you are starting with less quality, covering it with paint is a great solution. I thought that a wash would be the way to go so we did a couple of tests using the same paint colour (Puritan Gray by Benjamin Moore with water to dilute it) as at Lawrence:

Then we brought actual floor people in. They suggested a stain and then 4 layers of varnish on top. They did a test using our paint colour and a charcoal grey that they recommended:

And this is where it all goes wrong. The Puritan gray looked really green on the maple. The charcoal grey was really blue/brown. And instead of saying what a little voice inside me was whispering :”neither of these is right”, I went with the darker, greyer version. I should have asked for more options, even if it meant delaying the finished product. I should have been a little bossier with the floor folk. I also should have gone back to the original dream which was to have a white washed PAINTED floor. No stain. Paint. Shoulda, woulda, coulda… Instead I woke up to a text from Sefi insisting that the new floor looked like poo.

Now poo might be a little strong. In some light, the floor either looked blue, grey, brown or purple. And to be honest, if it were just the stain colour I would probably be able to live with it. But the combination of the stain colour, the orange/brown/yellow/red of the brick and the very short planks was too much. We are fighting the space on this project: it looks really shiny and loft-like and new and this floor does not break that look at all. It underlines it. But my main issue is that it made this nice hardwood floor look like cheap, engineered floating floor from Home Depot. Not that there is anything wrong with using that kind of flooring. In a basement. But in here? Hell to the no!

So we have decided to swallow this costly mistake. This is a huge expanse of floor. The bad colour was making all of my other choices look bad. This is the floor. It needs to be right. So. We are going to re-sand (why the 4 layers of varnish, why?). Then we are going to paint. It will be flat and not white washed but it will be waaaaaay better. In Sweatshirt Gray.

So my life lessons this week: it is always best to listen to your gut (obviously). Ask a bajillion questions if you can’t quite picture something. And if the mistake is made and you really hate it and you can afford it (and even if you can’t), fix it instead of sucking it up. You may always regret having made the mistake but you won’t regret fixing it.

xa