What to Think About Before Painting Your Floors White

Thinking about painting your wood floors white? You’re officially my hero. Personally, I think it takes a lot of guts to paint the surface you walk on the lightest shade on the planet. So, real quick before we jump into it – You’re Awesome, if you’re even considering this option.

Painting wood floors white is a popular trend with the “farmhouse community”. Which doesn’t make too much sense to me because when you think of the “farm lifestyle” don’t you automatically think of mud and dirt? And you know what white floors aren’t great for? Mud and dirt. But whatever, white floors are so gorgeous, so I refuse to care about it making sense.

So, we took the plunge into painting our floors white when renovating our attic into a loft master bedroom. And I don’t regret it for one second. Today let’s talk about why I don’t regret my choice and what you should ask yourself before taking the plunge.

Price & Labor Time

HGTV has sold us on the idea that sanding and staining hardwood floors is a piece of cake. Well that may be true if you have the money to hire professionals and/or help. But refinishing them by yourself, while living in the house, is just a mess and time consuming.

(Note: Don’t get me wrong I love beautifully stained hardwood floors. I actually prefer them stained, in most cases.)

The cost of renting the sanding machines, the stain, the poly, all the tools that you’ll need, and the time it takes – it adds up quick. Painting the floors white saved us a ton of money we didn’t have. And because you don’t need to sand the floors to perfection, like you would if you were going to stain the floors, it takes 1/4 of the time and 1/4 of the mess.

Washability

With three small children, five cats, and two black labs, these floors have seen their fair share of messes. There have been numerous nose bleeds, children with markers, animal accidents, and everything else you can imagine. Those are the days were I am extra thankful for our floors, they clean up like a champion. If we had installed carpet, it would for sure need to be replaced by now.

Fixable

Like I mentioned before we have a ton of animals. The dogs especially leave divots and scuff marks into the hardwood floors. It’s a pain to fix when the hardwood floors are stain and poly. But with the white paint it takes practically no time and all. And you can’t tell where the patches are made because it blends in seamlessly.

We are moving from this house soon and will be leaving this beautiful room. Yes – the floors don’t look perfect. But it will take no time at all and very little money to throw a fresh coat of paint to touch it up. The new owners will be good to go.

Ask yourself, “Can I live with imperfect floors?”

That is the real question that you need to spend some time pondering over. If you like the look of white floors – that’s great! But the truth is they are not going to look picture perfect all the time. Truthfully they won’t look picture perfect even most of the time. You are going to need to vacuum and mop more than you would with traditionally stained and polyed floors.

I specifically didn’t remove the imperfections from the photos for this post, and I didn’t spend a ton of time cleaning them before hand. I wanted you to see what real life with white hardwood floors looks like. Instagram and Pintrest show you the glamor, but this post is about real life. There is discolor in the creases that I need to clean, black dog hair, and there is sticker residue from where a kid placed a Minnie Mouse sticker that I still haven’t scraped off. But I love these floors and I don’t regret it one bit.

However, I would take a minute to think about your lifestyle and preferences when it come to what you want your house to look like on a daily basis. White floors are truthfully unforgiving BUT they are stunningly gorgeous at the same time.

I hope you enjoyed this post. It’s a little different that our normal posts but I had a few questions about our loft area, so I hope this helps you guys out. If you have any questions login and leave a comment below, I promise to get back to you.

Thank-you for taking time out of your day to hang out here!