New Farmhouse Flooring!

When we bought our fixer-upper, I vowed that I would be patient and would wait for new farmhouse flooring. Our farmhouse is 120+ years old. Although it has plenty of charm, it also had lots of things that we needed to change, and pronto. The first entire year we were here, all of our extra money went to a new furnace and appliances.

But as we started ticking off projects, like our upstairs bathroom remodel, I got antsy. When we worked on remodeling our upstairs bedroom floors, we had visions of being just like Chip and Jo. We tore out the old carpets, hoping that there would be beautiful wood floors underneath. Alas, they were not in great shape.

After pulling out all the carpet nails, we decided to smooth them out and paint them. I love how our upstairs looks now, but when we discussed what we wanted for our downstairs living spaces, painted wood floors weren’t in the cards.

New Farmhouse Flooring Choices

In a perfect world, Matt and I would have wood floors downstairs. However, we’ve had wood floors in other homes in the past, and I hated how scratched up they got by Yosemite’s claws. Even though he’s the cutest little dog, we’re not willing to go through the expense of buying wood flooring, only to have them damaged. In a 120+-year-old house, we are also concerned about water leaks, which would ruin wood floors.

Matt and I went to Lumber Liquidators, Lowe’s, and Home Depot to price out our farmhouse flooring and to look at the selection. We gathered all kinds of samples and briefly even considered tile that has a wood look. We discussed bamboo, laminate, engineered wood, and vinyl. For us, it was pretty easy to nix certain colors, but the material was a hard decision. I really loved the bamboo but it was at the very top of our budget. We were almost ready to pull the trigger on laminate but the overall quality was questionable. Finally, we landed on wide click vinyl flooring from the same manufacturer as the bamboo we loved, calibamboo.com. It was waterproof, scratchproof, and had a 50-year warranty. Now for the hard part, color.

Decisions, Decisions!

Matt and I are lucky in that we (mostly!) have the same taste. Paint is an easy thing to re-do if you don’t like it but flooring? That is a commitment. We both want an antique look on our floors and gravitate to modern traditional farmhouse style. Our walls downstairs are going to be primarily white shiplap and light paint colors. Right now, everything downstairs is so dark, and it’s compounded by poor lighting. That makes it even harder to make this decision, so I thought it would be fun to ask my readers for their opinions.

This flooring has to be pretty versatile since we have original dark wood ceiling beams in our living room that we won’t be parting with. We also have some furniture that we want to keep that has natural wood tones in it. Here’s what we narrowed our farmhouse flooring choices down to.

Mesquite

Mesquite has a lot of varying tones in it. When I think of antique farmhouse flooring, I picture families gathering together to put houses up, using wood that was on hand. Here’s a small section of it taken against a distressed white wood background for the sake of contrast.

Here’s what it would look like on a larger surface area.

Hickory Brook

Hickory Brook has a narrow grain look. There are some light threads in the coloring, but the overall look is a dark, rich brown. Here’s a small section of it taken on the same background as the first option.

Here’s what it would look like on a larger surface area.

Walnut Creek

Walnut Creek has a wider wood grain look, with larger sections of a light brown, almost blonde color mixing with medium browns and very dark browns. Here’s how this one looks in a small section pieced together.

Here’s what it would look like on a larger surface area.

What do you think? Do you have a definite favorite? Help us make our decision and let me know in the comments!