The first place we did a farmhouse wide plank flooring made from plywood was in the dining room earlier in the year.

Now we’re doing the same farmhouse wide plank flooring in the living room. For the most part, both the floors were done the same way, with a couple of exceptions. In this article, we’ll cover what was different with the living room floor. You can see all the details for the dining room plywood floor here.

The dining room’s wide plank flooring took about a week to finish, the living room took a lot longer. The space was a bit larger but mostly it was adding shims and the end grain flooring inlay that added a ton more time to the project.

From start to finish, it took a little over two weeks to finish the living room floor.

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What We Did Different With This Farmhouse Wide Plank Flooring

Just about the same methods we used for both the flooring in the dining room and the living room.

In the living room, we pulled up the old carpet, removed staples, painted the sub-floor a dark color and put down the floor the same way.

The width, length and thickness of the plywood planks was the same, and we cut, sanded, distressed, stained and added 3 coats of polyurethane to the flooring in almost the same way.

Here are the things we did a bit differently.

We Didn’t Sand Between Polyurethane Coats

When we did the dining room floor, we lightly sanded the bumps out of the coat of polyurethane with 120 grit sand paper.

With the living room floors we figured that the bumps would even out a little after multiple coats of poly were applied.

Besides, the bumps would add a bit more texture making the floors less slippery.

The only concern I had was how it would feel walking barefoot on the floor with more texture. Turns out, despite clearly feeling the additional texture when running your hand on the plank, it was barely noticeable when walking on it barefoot.

The Shopping List

A New Character Builder Was Used

We Added Shims

The Living Room Plywood Floor Is Finished!

Like I said, the living room floor took much longer to do than the dining room floor did. It took a little over two weeks to finish, had I not messed up with the wood slice accent flooring, we would have finished in about 2 weeks.

Check out the wood slice accent flooring project here

We love the farmhouse wide plank flooring in both the dining room and the living room. This style was the perfect fit for this house, could not have asked for a better fit.

Between the two floors, I’d say I’d stick to the steps used on the living room floor. Sanding between poly coats seems to have been unnecessary, and using the utility knife to expand on the cracks in the wood added sooo much more character to the living room floor – LOVE IT!

Here’s a few more pictures of the stained plywood floors in the living room floor.

Let me know what you think, is there something you would have done different?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

As you’d expect, DIY Rustic Wide Plank Plywood Flooring takes much longer than just installing pre-made planks. This was truest sense of DIY, all the way from cutting plywood into wide plank boards, to sanding, staining, finishing and installing the plywood planks down… all of it DIY.

All things considered, the entire project, from start to finish didn’t take that long. 

From cutting the planks out of plywood, to finally Installing the floors in both the dining room and kitchen – took about a week.

If you’re willing to put in the time and sweat, it is absolutely worth it! 

The floors look gorgeous (the pictures don’t do it justice) and you really would not know that they are a stained plywood floor.

Read on to see what it took to make and install our rustic wide plank plywood floors and how you can install your own unique plywood flooring.

*PLEASE NOTE, SOME OF THESE LINKS ARE AFFILIATE LINKS. THAT MEANS IF YOU CLICK ON ONE OF THE PRODUCT LINKS, WE’LL RECEIVE A SMALL COMMISSION AT NO EXTRA COST TO YOU. IT HELPS SUPPORT THIS BLOG AND ALLOWS US TO KEEP SHARING OUR CONTENT FOR FREE. AS AN AMAZON ASSOCIATE I EARN FROM QUALIFYING PURCHASES.

Why We Chose Wide Plank Plywood Flooring

Some of the flooring in our Poconos vacation rental needed replacing.  Namely, the floating hardwood floor in the dining room and kitchen and the carpet in the living room.

Our goal was to have new floors that look old, warm and worn – like they had always been there. Basically, the more it looked like farmhouse flooring or barn wood the better it was for us.

We looked into tile, stone and hardwood floors. The problem with all 3 of those flooring solutions was the requirement to have a level sub-floor, ours was uneven… like really uneven.

Since the entire house is made of rough-cut oak, the flooring is not even close to being level. That makes tile, stone and even hardwood flooring very difficult to install. The extra difficulty also translates to very expensive installation costs.

It was time to get creative, DIY floors were in our future. To get more flooring ideas we turned to Pinterest. After a lot of scrolling, we came across rustic farmhouse wide plank plywood flooring!

The pictures of the wide plank plywood flooring projects others had posted were incredible – this was it! This was the perfect flooring for uneven floors.

We were sold on the idea.

Why Use Plywood Flooring

Most people decide to install plywood plank flooring for the cost savings. It’s much cheaper to install a plywood floor than traditional hardwood or even a laminate, heck it’s even cheaper than doing vinyl.

For our plywood farmhouse floors, the cost wasn’t much of a factor in our decision-making process. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always nice to save some dough… it was just lower on our list.

Higher on our list was flooring that was sturdy, looked like it has always been there, fit with the style of the house and would be easy to install on an uneven floor. 

Between the option of making wider planks and the spacing between each one – wide plank plywood flooring was a perfect fit for this house. The spacing between each board makes it more forgiving in scenarios like ours where the floor isn’t level.

On top of that, the Japanese concept I came across helped me realize that any blemishes the floor will gain as it ages will only add to the floor’s beauty. So it didn’t need to be as sturdy as hardwood, just embrace the imperfections that will come along! 🙂

The Down-side to Plywood Flooring

The only negative I saw with plywood was the durability. It’s not a hardwood so it would scratch easier than an oak flooring would.

Now with my new wabi sabi perspective, I’m actually looking forward to the scratches and dents.

The blemishes will only add to the floor’s beauty. If there’s a scratch that is really ugly, I can add something creative to give it beauty.

Perfectly imperfect.

The Shopping List

What Plywood Dimensions We Chose

The plywood we used is 1/2″ thick, mostly because the thinner plywood is more flexible. The flexibility allows the planks to bend and conform to our uneven sub-floor’s contours.

We wanted the farmhouse or country kind of look, so a wide plank is what we went with.

We also wanted to reduce the amount of wasted plywood, so the width we came up with was 5 7/8″ for each board. That gives us 8 planks per sheet and a tiny strip leftover at the end.

We’ve seen other plywood floors where they went for closer to 8 inch or even 12 inch boards. We didn’t want to make them that wide because we didn’t want it to be obvious that it was a plywood floor, and a wide board would have shown the dreaded plywood zebra pattern that I don’t care for (more on the plywood zebra pattern later).

Some Before Pics

How Much Plywood Do You Need

Prepping the Subfloor

Subfloor Painting

Cutting The Plywood Into Planks

The Jig

Tip:  If you’re cutting your own boards you need to make a jig. When making your jig, extend the 1 x 4 way in front and way behind the saw, like it is in the pictures.

That lets you line up the saw way before the blade comes in contact with the plywood. It also gives more stability, ending up with a straighter cut.

The Best Saw Blade To Use

Sanding Each Plank

Giving The Plywood Some “Character”

Adding Even More Character – Burning The Plywood Boards

Here’s a video of how we burned the rustic wide plank plywood flooring.

The Stain We Chose

The gel stain we used had a dark color and created a lighter stain on the wood. The result was a cherry colored wood with a dark grain pattern on top, exactly what we were looking for.

The thicker you applied the stain the darker the board would be.

Also, the longer you waited before brushing the excess stain off the darker the plank will be. If a plank had a heavy zebra pattern on it, we put the stain on thick and waited a bit more before dry brushing it. That did a pretty good job of minimizing the zebra pattern.

The brush we used for the stain was a cheap wide (about 4″) real bristle brush.

The stain has a strong polyurethane smell to it, so we did the staining out on the deck and also let the boards dry out there.

If you’re going to do the same, make sure to first check the weather forecast!

We used about 7 quarts of stain to do our project.

Applying The Stain

Applying The Finish

Update: When we originally did the dining room floor we did a light sanding before the final coat of poly.

Recently we did the living room floor and for that flooring, we skipped the sanding before the poly.

We figured not sanding would give the planks a bit more texture and save us a boatload of time.

It worked out really well! From now on, we won’t be sanding before the final poly coat.

It’s All About That Space

The spaces between each plank were perfect for the style we were looking for.

The spacing would give it more of that farmhouse feel. A few of the posts on Pinterest mentioned using quarters as spacers, so that’s what we used.

Our wide plank plywood flooring has small variations in the spacing, mostly because of the uneven floors – but that’s ok – wabi sabi. 😉

Where To Start Laying The Planks

Make Sure To Space Out The Seams

Cutting The Boards To Length

I used a miter saw to cut the boards to length. Pretty straight forward. One tip is to make sure the blade reaches full speed before you start cutting into the plywood. That’ll give you a clean, smooth cut.

Securing The Rustic Wide Plank Plywood Flooring In Place

Tip: If you end up buying the same nail gun I’d recommend also buying an extra battery. It already comes with one battery, buying the extra battery will help keep your project moving along.

A Couple More Notes

The plywood flooring we installed is 1/2″ thick and the previous flooring was 3/8″ thick.

The 1/8″ difference meant any spaces where the previous flooring used to fit – the new flooring no longer did.

That difference meant a lot of undercutting. Not only the door moldings but all the furring strips that cover the seams of the oak boards on the walls.

I could have done it with a dovetail saw, but since I had quite a few cuts to do, I bought an oscillating tool. It worked perfectly!

The tool comes with a bunch of different attachments. I haven’t used it for anything else yet but I can think of a few different uses for it in the future.

All Done – That’s It!

So, all told, it took roughly a week from complete start to complete finish. Including the old floor removal, subfloor painted, 10 sheets of plywood cut into strips, sanded, distressed, stained, polyied and installed.

This was a good sized project with a lot of effort put into it, but it was well worth it. We now have a completely unique floor that fits perfectly with the house, and looks fantastic!!

In the fall, we’re going to install the same rustic wide plank plywood flooring in the living room, and I’m really looking forward to it.

We’re also going to do a unique transition between the living room and dining room floors… can’t wait.

Update: Well, we redid the living floors recently and we also installed the wood slice accent flooring. Everything turned out perfect!

We wrote about those experiences also, check out those posts here:

Wood Slice Accent Flooring

Farmhouse Wide Plank Flooring

Here’s some more pics of the work in progress and the finished product.

Let me know what you think, is there something you would have done different?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!