A few posts ago, we talked about hardwood floor stain colors. As we mentioned, we narrowed down our options to three: Dark Walnut, Ebony and Jacobean. The next day, our super-nice “floor guy”, Frank, applied them to the floor to let us see the stains on our red oak floors.

We looked at the above samples in every lighting possible: sunlight, lights on, lights off, in the dark and even three different kinds of light bulbs. Call us crazy, but the stain will be going throughout the house (see floor plan here), so we want to make sure it’s absolutely perfect. In addition to our lighting experiments, we went through an extensive process of elimination to make sure we were making the right decision. Here’s how it went…

Let’s start with Jacobean. When we looked at the swatches in the booklet, we really liked this stain. However, when we saw a bigger sample on our floors, we weren’t so sure anymore. We liked the extra-dark grain, but didn’t feel like the other browns were rich enough. If there’s anything we don’t want, it’s for the floors to be too light. We crossed this one off the list.

When given the sample deck, my favorite was the Ebony stain. Within seconds of being handed the sample deck, I said, “Yep, this is it!” We had our reservations about it being too dark, but we wanted to see it on the floor just in case. On our floors, though, it wasn’t dark enough in certain lighting, and it had a lot of unexpected lighter gray tones. We ruled this one out without reservation. Gray undertones were not what we were looking for.

Then came Dark Walnut. This choice was Greg’s favorite. I wasn’t too crazy about it at first because I didn’t think it was dark enough. However, I became a big fan when we saw the sample on our floors. We love how the stain really brings out the wood grain. We also love the mixture of  rich, dark browns. We really have nothing bad to say about this stain, other than it could stand to be somewhat darker on the non-grain portions. Nevertheless, it looks like we have a winner! We told Frank, our “floor guy”, we wanted it somewhat darker than the sample if at all possible. We are very anxious to see the final result!

Frank and his crew are coming in next week to begin the staining process! We are ultra-excited that it’s finally time for this point in the renovation. We feel like we should have a floor staining party or something! Maybe a celebratory Ukrop’s cupcake will have to do until we move in, though : )