Amber found a number of great blogs by young first-time homeowners doing work on interesting projects, like putting in wood stoves (we’re planning on it), owning chickens (we’re planning on that too), and how to decorate in an all-orchid color palette (I’m planning on it). I figured, heck, I can right reel good-like to, so I’m going to (try to) document similar endeavors at HOMESTEAD. And when the posts stop coming, you’ll know we finally set it all on fire and you can claim your office pool.

The first “project” wasn’t actually done by us, but it was definitely the first big investment: the floors. We’ve both always wanted dark brown flooring in our house and flooring HOMESTEAD has in spades. But it looked like this:

Which isn’t bad by any means, but it’s not what we wanted. Also, we were going to have to have a few spots redone by pros anyway, so we figured we should execute on both plans at once, before we moved in (this took a lot of convincing on Amber’s part, but in the end her logic beat my miser-dom), and be done with it.

After about 45 minutes of testing out colors with the floor guys, we decided on this:

Despite the overall gloomy-toned picture above, we love the final product. It pops when the light hits it stays nicely matted. It never gets black and the planks play off one another to show the wood’s natural variations. We couldn’t be happier.

TAKEAWAY: To get the exact color you see on a stain chip, according to our floor guys, you need to not only stain but also dye. This was painfully clear as I held Minwax’ dark walnut chip against a tested floor area that was only about a 20% saturation of the chip color. I still don’t fully understand the reasoning, but if we were going to get what we wanted in a truly dark tone, we were going to have to also have the floors dyed. Where the usual staining and refinishing process requires 1,000 layers of work, dyeing just brings it to 1,001, and at about a $250-300 cost, so not that big a deal.