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When In Doubt – Wabi-Sabi

The measurements doesn’t need to be super duper precise. Rounding up the measurements and adding an extra board to the total gives enough wiggle room.

For our space, I treated it like a big rectangle. The length was 287″ (rounded up to 24′) and the width was 140″ (rounded up to 12′).

24 x 12 is 288 sq feet.

Each sheet of plywood is 4′ x 8′ so that gives you 32 square feet per sheet.

When I divided the total sq feet (288) by the sq feet per sheet (32) it told me I needed 9 sheets of plywood.

Then I added an extra sheet as a buffer.

The Final Numbers

We bought 10 sheets of 1/2″ plywood for our project and once completed, we had about 1 sheet left over.

A jig is fancy talk for a template. It really made a tedious and time consuming task super easy.

It was basically a 1/2″ piece of scrap plywood I had with a scrap piece of 1 x 4 screwed to it.

The space between the saw blade and the piece of 1 x 4 was 5 7/8″, the thickness we wanted our plywood flooring boards to be.

To make the jig I put the blade of the saw all the way up, secured the saw to the plywood with screws all around the saw, wedging it in place.

Then I plunge cut the saw into the plywood and  measured 5 7/8″ from the inside of the plunge cut and that’s where I screwed in the 1 x 4.

We had 10 sheets of plywood to cut into boards. I figured that a plywood blade would be the best. I thought anything else would leave a really rough edge on the wood.

Well I was very wrong. The plywood blade didn’t last very long and took a lot of effort to go though the plywood. It started smoking and having a lot more difficulty cutting barely half way into the second sheet of plywood.

I ended up having to go out and buy another blade. This time I tried a cross cut blade, OMG what a difference.

The cross cut blade went through the plywood like butter and left an even better cut than the plywood blade did. I was able to do the rest of the plywood using just that one cross cut blade.

Total Time: 2 people about a day and a half

This part took a while but it’s important to put the time into it. We sanded the face of the plywood to remove any splinters and the text that is sometimes stamped on the plywood.

We also used the sander to round the edges all around the face of each board.

The rounded edge gives it a really nice finished look and helps in cases like ours, where the floors aren’t very level. the edge gives a soft transition between two boards that don’t quite line up.

This is where you choose which side of the plywood will be the face, the pretty side or the ugly side. When we were choosing sides, I’d say we chose the ugly side 80% of the time.

It went against what I would normally do, but now I kinda wish I went with the ugly side more.

We used a belt sander to do most of the sanding. You could use a palm sander if you’re not doing too much flooring but in our case the belt sander was much faster.

The sandpaper we used was 120 grit, it was perfect for the belt sander.

During this part of the project, you’ll have your doubts about using the gnarly part of the plywood. BUT TRUST ME – once you put the stain on the wood you will be blown away at how good it looks.

In the end the boards that were the most beautiful were the ones with the imperfections.

Tip:

If a board has a knot or crack in it, don’t put it to the side or use it in an area you can’t see.

Instead, make it more noticeable. Dig into the knot or crack with the sander to emphasis the crack or knot more. It’ll help remove splinters that are around the knot or crack, and also add character.

Total Time: We did this at the same time as sanding so it’s included in the day and a half spent sanding

There were three weapons of choice for applying the plywood’s character (a.k.a. distressing), a hammer, a big pair of pliers and a propane torch. Out of the three I used the pliers the most and the hammer the least.

Using pliers, I’d repeatedly hit the face of the plywood with the back corner of the pliers.

With the hammer I used the side of the hammer to make indentations in the plywood.

If you look at the floor right above the hammer in the picture you’ll see the indentations the back of the pliers left.

Burning The Plywood

The propane torch was by far my favorite character builder – and it wasn’t because it spoke to my inner pyro…. well maybe a little because of my inner pyro lol. Burning the plywood gives an instant amazing aged look.

This is another part of the process where I hesitated. After applying the stain though the boards look incredible!

I would burn the plywood whenever the board looked a little boring. Take a look at the arrows in the picture, each one of those dark marks are the work of the propane torch.

Tip: When burning the plywood the lighter parts of the wood burn much easier than the darker parts.  Because I was avoiding that plywood zebra pattern, I didn’t burn the wood where there was a heavy zebra pattern.

If the part of the wood either only dark or only light then it was eligible for burning.

We tried a bunch of different stains on scrap pieces of plywood first, and this was by far our favorite!

We went with a gel stain instead of a regular stain because it does a really good job of covering up the zebra pattern.

It’s totally a personal preference but I do not like the pattern you get from regular stain on plywood floors. Take a look at this picture I copied from Pinterest, for an example of what I’m talking about.

Regular stain is more liquid and gets absorbed by the plywood at different rates. Softer parts of the wood absorb the stain faster than the denser parts of the wood.

A work around would also be to use a wood conditioner before applying regular stain. Instead we used the gel stain.

With the gel there was no need to add an extra step of adding wood conditioner. Plus, the gel stain added a nice wood grain pattern on the surface of the board, making it look less like plywood.

Total Time: 2 people about a day

We did one coat of stain using the dry brush technique. Applying the stain with the wet brush and using a dry brush to brush off the excess stain.

With every pass of the dry brush, we would wipe off the dry brush on a paper towel to remove the majority of the stain from it.

We chose the dry brush method because it leaves a nice dark wood pattern.

When applying the stain and dry brushing, you’ll be able to play with the texture it leaves. Put some wavy grain in there or brush around a knot in the wood to add uniqueness to each board.

Like I said the longer you left the stain and the longer you waited before using the dry brush the darker the board will be.

We typically applied the stain and waited a couple of minutes before using the dry brush.

If the board had a lot of pattern on it then we applied a thicker coat and let it sit a little longer. The thicker coat and longer wait time did a better job of masking the zebra pattern.

Once the stain was applied we waited 24 hours before applying the polyurathane.

Total Time: 2 people about a day and a half

For the finish we used a clear satin, water based, oil-modified polyurethane.

This product is great because it doesn’t change the color of the stain, dries quickly and best of all – it’s oderless.

We went with a satin finish because we wanted an aged look – glossy floor would be the opposite of that.

We did three thin coats of poly on all the boards, including the sides of the boards. We waited 2 hours between each coat and 24 hours after the last coat before installing them.

We didn’t sand between the first and second coats. We did do a light hand sanding with 120 grit sand paper before applying the final coat.

The brush we used for the poly was a cheap wide (about 6″) synthetic brush.

We used 2 gallons for our project

I used a tip I came across on one of the Pinterest posts, starting on the side of the room where the floor is the most visible.

For our space the most visible part of the floor was by the front door so that’s where we started.

When we reached the opposite end of the space we ended up with the last row of boards needing to be ripped in half.

Each board was 8 feet long and the room was a little over 12 feet wide, so there weren’t too many seams to work with.

The rule of thumb is to not have two consecutive rows with seems less than a foot apart from each other.