Our Hardwood Floors So Far

Hi Everyone I'm back with our hardwood floors update! Last Tuesday I shared that we decided to stain our hardwood floors Jacobean. We loved how rich the stain looked on our unfinished floors showing all the pretty variations of our wood grain from soft to dark. The stain was applied to our hardwood floors and it looked amazing! I was lucky enough to be able to walk though our hallways on the unstained floors and take a peak at how the floors looked. Basically they took my breath away and are amazing!! The color was exactly how I imagined it would not to dark and not to light but a warm deep brown with pretty color variations. 

I snapped these pictures while the stain was drying so the color may look darker in some pictures 

My bedroom as you can see in the pictures the stain was still wet, but looked amazing in person!

Our floor guy, finishing up the staining in our living room. 

After the flooring dried the 'floor guys' returned the next day to apply one coat of clear poly. Then waited another three days to cover our floors up with liner to keep them damage and debris free. Once our house is almost near completion, the flooring guys will come back out and apply  two more coats of poly to our hardwoods making them extra protected and shiny. We decided to go with a semi gloss poly finish instead of satin. We just felt since we were going dark brown the extra shine on the floors would look nicer and more sleek verses going with satin which will read a little flat our our hardwoods. After seeing the first coat of clear poly, I can tell we made the right decision for our floors. 

Once we get to the final phase of our home re-build project, I'll have a bunch of pictures to share along with our floor guys information for anyone local in Sacramento looking to have their hardwood floors refinished or installed. We are also using the same flooring guys for our bathroom & laundry room tile! 

What do you think so far? 

Three Shades of Grey

It wasn't that long ago that we painted our house a shade of medium shade of grey, painting over our all peach house. We chose a medium-light grey and painted our house ourselves a few months before I began blogging way back in 2009, I never wrote down the color of the paint since we had leftover paint in the garage. You can read more about our painting process

here

. Now that the exterior siding of our house is done, its time to choose paint colors. Hasani and I both decided we love our house grey but what colors? 

Over the past few months I've collected a ton of grey paint swatches for our interior but none for our exterior  go figure. Since it was crunch time Hasani and I headed to Home Depot to check out paint colors and within a few minutes narrowed it down to three shades of grey. We went from light grey to dark grey.....to give an us idea what each color would look like on our exterior. Here's a reminder of our house currently

looks

. 

We painted decided to paint two spots on our homes exterior, because they both get different lighting depending on how the sun is hitting our house. Along with three paint samples I bought three cheapo sponge paint bushes great for one time use and cheap enough that its no biggie to toss them after use. I painted each color on our homes siding then held up the paint sample next to painted section snapped a picture so we could remember what paint color we used. 

Brand: Behr  Color: Pier 

Brand: Berh Color: Classic Silver

Brand Behr Color: Elephant Skin

The three shades from top to bottom: Pier, Classic Silver & Elephant Skin

We took a few minutes for the paint to dry to decide on what color we didn't like, then choose the color we did. Within minutes we both agreed Classic Silver had way to many blue undertones for our taste and just look flat and too light. 

We went back and forth over between Elephant Skin and Pier. Hasani preferred Elephant Skin, I liked

 it, but it reminded me of a 'play it safe color' and not as grey as I would have liked. 

I really liked how Pier was a deeper, richer color than Elephant Skin. We stepped back and looked at the colors with our new roof in view  then both agreed that Pier was the winner!

We are painting the whole house body Pier color matched at Sherwin Williams, the brand our painter prefers and painting our door/window trim and edge boards a crisp clean creamy white to match our new seamless gutters. Our house is being painted today! Weather permitting, we've had funky weather the past week of so and our home was supposed to get painted paint last week. I can't wait to see how our home looks once its all painted! 

What color did you like best? What is your favorite house color? In addition to grey, I've always liked white colonial style houses with bright red doors!