Hardwood Floors: Making New Look Old

Are you partial to the vintage look? Then get busy and start beating up your hardwood floors.

Across America, as countless homeowners restore well-worn hardwood floors to their originalluster, others are hard at work making their new floors look very, very old. That has some homeowners or their handymen grinding, pummeling, notching, andeven taking an ice pick to brand-new hardwood floor boards.

Not to worry: they can take it, according to Susan Regan of the Hardwood Information Center. She said, "I can't think of another floor material that's so appealing when it's old that people go out of their way to distress it ahead of time. Since a hardwood floor can last 100 years or more, this is a way to enjoy that old-world character and patina now."

The trend toward vintage isn't just a California thing. Manhasset, N.Y.,interior designer Doreen Rose Stempien is among East Coast homeowners who are adding old-world style to hardwood floors. The stained designs on her plank floors are distressed to look decades - even centuries - older.

Use stain to create faux inlays

When friends step into Stempien's 72-year-old Georgian colonial, they assume the gorgeous oak floor in the foyer has a geometric inlay.  They're wrong. The diamond pattern trimmed by a simple border actually is stained.

"The look is very soft and pretty and old," Stempien says. "Ilove it. Many of the old, historical homes had diamond patterns on thefloor."

Stempien's floor refinisher sanded the floor and applied a coat of stain mixed to match the color of the wood floors in the adjacent dining and living rooms. Next, he carefully laid out the 7-inch diamonds, taping around those that would be darker and then staining them in a walnut finish.

A day later, he drew the lines for the 2 1/4-inch border, taped the edges and stained it in an even darker tone. Two coats of a fast-drying semigloss polyurethane were added to seal in the design and give the floor lasting protection.