Stenciled Floors

Stenciled floor

Here is a fantastic idea that I wish I could do tomorrow. I find these stenciled floors beautiful and wildly appealing. Unfortunately we’re renters so this will have to wait until Mr. Sthole builds me my dream home. Of course I would rather have *this vanity*. This would be fantastic for a mud room, a craft room, or any other area that you wouldn’t mind making a bold statement! This project took approximately 5 hours and $24! You can’t ask for a more time and budget friendly revamp than that!

To prep our subfloor, which is particle board (a very smooth and almost chalky surface) we used wood filler to make the seams between the different particle boards sheets less obvious. There were only three so it went pretty fast. Once dry, we sanded them down. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better.

Then we primed it all with Aqualock water based primer (it was low-VOC but not no-VOC so John got that step done while I was outside playing with Clara). The purpose of the primer was to help the paint grab on for the long haul and block any stains/bleed-through that might occur from painting over such a porous surface like particle board.

For paint, we grabbed two $12 quarts of semi-gloss paint in the new no-VOC Olympic Icon line, matched to two Benjamin Moore colors: Revere Pewter for our base (same as the wall) and Gargoyle (for the darker stencil pattern). For the last few years we’ve mostly stuck with Benjamin Moore paints, but for temporary upgrades it’s nice to save a little money since we’ll be ripping out this floor in a few years and tiling anyway. We didn’t use an outdoor porch and floor paint (as you usually would in this scenario) because they’re all pretty fumey (usually oil-based) we wanted something no-VOC (this one’s for you, fetus) – but we think the combination of a good primer, some semi-gloss paint, and a nice thick coat of sealer will keep them in good shape for the next few years. We’ll definitely report back with photos over time to share how the floor wears.

With the primer dry, we could apply two coats of the base color. Since this was a no-VOC step, I could cut in while John rolled the rest (we just had to be mindful to paint ourselves out of the space). You can see from the picture below that the color matched Revere Pewter on the floor didn’t really turn out to match the real RP color on the walls as we planned (that’s always the risk that you take when you color match one brand to another), but it was still in the same color family, so we didn’t mind. We’re going for some pretty high contrast interest on the floor, but we thought it would stay sophisticated if we kept the palette sort of subdued (especially with a bold navy-ish tone in the bedroom along with a colorful rug/headboard/pillows/etc) so we were just glad they didn’t clash and still felt like they went together, even if they didn’t match perfectly.

Stenciling the floor is SO MUCH EASIER if you have two people on hand to tag team it. I did the office stencil project alone for the most part, and it took forever and I used a method I’d never use again (more on that in a minute) but this time around we both tackled it and it was a much simpler task. Oh and stenciling a floor is even easier than stenciling a wall since you’re not fighting gravity (a few pieces of painter’s tape hold it in place and then you can roll it without worrying it’ll slip down the wall like it might on a vertical surface).

Since you usually want your pattern centered in the room, we started our first stencil to be right in the middle of the vanity. Here you can see what a single repeat of the pattern looks like. It’s theSuzani Silk Road stencil from Royal Design Studios. It’s $49, but we had actually ordered it back in 2011 to use for our book (but that project ended up getting cut), so we just had it sitting under the bed in our guest room for a few years, waiting to be used.

But back to that much easier stenciling method that I mentioned before. We learned back when we were shooting that wall-stenciling project for our book that applying a small amount of paint with a foam roller (not too much, or it’ll get gummy/bleedy) results in just as clean of a line as dabbing everything on by hand, which I did when I stenciled the office, and ended up with claw hands and lost 14 hours of my life. This entire thing only took us 5 hours and was SO MUCH EASIER thanks to a small foam roller with a nice thin application of paint. Hallelujah!

Once again, when using a large stencil like this, it’s so much easier with two people. Each stencil has registration marks around the outside that you line up with the previous stencil so you know where to place it, and if you have someone on hand to help you line up the registration marks and slowly lower it down onto the floor (especially when they’re large) you should have a lot less of an issue with smudging, which can happen if you place it and then slide it around to match the registration marks instead of using four hands to slowly lower it into the right place off the bat (one hand for each corner just seems to work best).

This room’s biggest challenge was that so many walls and corners meant lots of partial stencils, which meant lots of stencil bending (it’s made from flexible plastic that bends, but doesn’t crease, easily) and smooshing the roller into tight spots. We kept some spare cardboard handy (i.e. cereal boxes) to protect the wall from getting paint on it when we had to bend the stencil and it would have rested against the baseboard/wall. Between each placement of the stencil, John also held it up with two fingers with the back facing me and I used a folded paper towel to dab off any excess paint on the back so that the next time we placed it no leftover paint was lingering on the back (this can result in sort of a ghosted double outline, so the quick wipe down between each placement really seems worth the time).

When doing a floor you also have to consider your exit route. In a typical square space this is pretty easy to figure out, but there was no logical way for us to both keep an exit clear and be sure we were keeping our pattern straight/centered (we wanted to start in the middle of the vanity and work out from there, so we couldn’t start in the corner of the closet and stencil our way out because things wouldn’t have been centered on the vanity). For that reason, we decided up front that it would be easiest to paint across two days in smaller installments. We did as much as we could easily access the first day, then let those areas dry so we could stand on them to complete some remaining spots. Picture it sort of like a checkerboard… you can do a row, leave a row clear, and do as much of the other row that attaches to something else you have already done as you can – and then walk out using the clear row. The next day, just go back and fill in those missing areas when the surrounding rows are dry so you can stand on them.

After all of the stenciling was done, I used a small craft brush to get into the spots that needed some filling in. Initially I thought I’d touch up the entire perimeter by hand with paint to make it look flush to the wall (the rolling left about a 1/2″ gap)…

… but after stepping back we realized the small gap was so consistent around the room that it almost looked like an intentional border. So rather than risk making it look worse with my by-hand touch ups, we opted to keep it that way. You can see the slight border around the baseboard in the bottom right of this picture:

As our final sealing step, we plan to use SafeCoat Acrylacq (a non-toxic poly that we have loved since my pregnancy with Clara) to seal it to give it even more added protection. So we hope to get that done and report back on how it goes as well as finishing up a few more things in there.