White Painted Floorboards - A Veteran's Story

I have spent a vast proportion of my adult life hankering after white painted floorboards.  Looking back, my infatuation probably began the very same day that I discovered the simple, fresh, austere beauty of Scandinavian interiors.  One look at all that blinding whiteness and I was completely brainwashed.  

So finally, one day, after endless discussions with my husband, we made the trip to our hardware store and purchased a very large tin of white paving paint. Having researched it to death, we concluded that regular paint wouldn't be tough enough to withstand the beating it would take in our home studio.  The first strike of the paint roller was nerve wracking to say the least, but not quite as heart-stopping perhaps as the point where half-way through the first coat we looked at each other and silently screamed "Mary Mother of God, what the hell have we done"!

Two coats later and our floor looked so sparkling and spectacular you needed sunglasses just to be in the vague vicinity of it.  It was breathtakingly gorgeous and serene.  We leapt and hugged and patted each other on the back, congratulating ourselves on our "fearless" and "brave" decorating choice.  "Ha!" I shouted, "We are designers God damn it and we shall have white floorboards no matter how fool hardy my mother thinks we are"!

I did love our white floor (we have since moved to a different home) but by crikey let me tell you it was not the easiest of loves to live with.  Everything, and I mean everything showed up on it like it was being examined in a science lab.  God forbid you should attempt to eat a biscuit at your desk or cut fabric.  Let alone the endless shedding of hair (me, Andre, Daphne Cat).  To clean it - which we did every other day, first with the vacuum, then the mop - I would get down on my hands and knees and scrape icky goo off with a kitchen knife.  Be warned, it is a particularly exhausting floor colour choice for anyone suffering even mildly from OCD.

So while I still love to look at beautiful homes sporting stunning white floorboards, I'm not sure my sanity (or my marriage) could withstand living with them again... unless we got a cleaner... who came every single day.  

For our floor, we used White Knight paving paint in White and applied it using a roller.

Images