If you’re planning on making your own wide plank flooring made from plywood, then make sure to take a look at this list – it will save you tons of time… and sanity :).

We wrote detailed articles for each of those projects (see below for links) but we also wanted to write a short article highlighting the biggest time saving tips we have.

Here are the 3 things you need to know for making your own wide plank plywood floors. Following these tips will make your project go smoothly and you’ll end up with better-looking plywood floors.

DIY Plank Plywood Floors Tips

A Bonus Tip First – Cut The Boards Yourself

Yeah, it’s a little different to get the bonus tip first, but a few of the tips piggy back on this one. So it makes sense to share this first.

And I know that cutting the boards yourself sounds like the opposite of a time saver, but let me explain. 

There are a few posts out there that recommend having the person at Lowes or Home Depot cut the plywood into planks for you.

I know that sounds like it would save you tons of time, because you’re offloading the cutting on them, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that.

We’ve had home improvement stores cut the plywood for us on other projects in the past.

Although it does save you time – we don’t think it’s worth it. Their cuts are not very accurate, like really inaccurate.

That may be perfectly find for certain projects, but with this project consistent cuts are important.

Having boards that are all about the same width allows your project to go smoother, easier and the end result will look much nicer.

#1 Make A Jig

#2 Don’t Use A Plywood Blade

This deserves another OMG. I tried using a plywood blade to cut the plywood into planks initially and that was a BIG MISTAKE!

Ignore the plywood blades – instead, use the cross-cut blades.

Like I said in the dining room flooring article, the plywood blade didn’t even make it through two sheets of plywood.

When I used the cross-cut blade, a single blade did the rest of the plywood for the dining room and also the living room!!

If you’re keeping score, the plywood blade barely ripped 2 sheets of plywood into planks and the cross-cut blade did 19 sheets – and it can still do more.

This is hands down the best blade for cutting plywood planks. It cut through the plywood like butter, and also didn’t splinter the wood at all.

(Click the picture to order the same blade we used on Amazon)

#3 Skip Sanding Between Polyurethane Coats

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

The only concern we had was how it would feel walking barefoot on the floor with more texture. When we ran our hands on the planks we could clearly feel the additional texture, so we were a bit nervous.

Well, it turns out, the additional texture was barely noticeable when walking on the floor barefoot. Phew, that was a relief!

There You Have It

Those are our time saving tips for DIY wide plank plywood floors. These few simple tips will save you HOURS and HOURS of time. Without them, our project would have taken A LOT longer and would have been harder to do.

The first two tips alone will save you from pulling your hair out! 

We hope they will help you with your own wide plank plywood flooring.

Let us know what you think!

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

Well, we loved it so much we did the same 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 go over the differences between the two floors.

Check out the dining room plywood floor article to see more of the step by step details.

As far as time goes, the dining room’s wide plank flooring took about a week to finish and the living room took a lot longer.

The living room is a bit bigger, but what really added time to the project were the shimming and the end grain flooring inlay.

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

What We Did Different With This Farmhouse Wide Plank Flooring

The methods we used for the flooring in the dining room and the living room were pretty much the same.

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 it was done in the dining room.

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.

There were some small changes we made that saved us a little time and may have added some more character to the plywood plank floor.

Here are the things we did a bit differently this go around.

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 sandpaper.

With the living room floors, we figured that the bumps on the plywood planks 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. Not that the dining room floors are slippery – it was just a way of justifying it in my head. 😉

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, we couldn’t have imagined 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 are a few more pictures of the stained plywood floors on the living room floor.

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

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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As you’d expect, DIY Rustic Wide Plank Plywood Flooring takes much longer to finish than just installing pre-made planks.

This project was the truest sense of DIY.  Everything from cutting the 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  stained plywood floors.

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.

Table Of Contents

Why Use Plywood Flooring

The Down-side To Plywood Flooring

Plywood Plank Thickness

Plywood Plank Width

The Type Of Plywood

Before Pics

How Much Plywood We Used

Prepping The Subfloor

Subfloor Painting

Cutting The Planks

Making A Jig

Sanding The Plank

Adding Character

Burning The Plywood Boards

Staining The Planks

Applying The Finish

Laying The Planks

Securing The Planks

Some Pictures

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 of them was that they all needed a level sub-floor and 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!

On Pinterest, there was a gazillion (well maybe not quite that many) plywood flooring ideas, but the one that was the best fit for us was the wide plank 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? It’s Affordable.

Most people decide to install plywood plank flooring because of it’s affordability.

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, we’ll just embrace the imperfections that come along with it! 🙂

Another Reason To Use Plywood Floor Planks? The Versatility

Another huge benefit to plywood floor planks is the design versatility.

I love how my plywood plank floors turned out. There really is nothing I would change, but one thing that’s great about plywood planks is that there is no limit to what you can do.

I LOVE the way the rustic plywood floor planks came out, but the plywood planks could have looked just as good with a modern look.

Take a look at plywood floor planks on Pinterest. You’ll see there is no limit to the style, color, shape, size, or texture. It’s all just a matter of preference – how cool is that?

The Cost Of Our DIY Plywood Flooring

We knew that we saved quite a bit of money by choosing plywood faux plank flooring but we didn’t realize how much until someone asked for a breakdown in the comments.

We saved a ton!!

Of course, what you save in dollars you lose in time. We didn’t look at it as a lose of time though, it saw it as a great way to get our creative juices flowing and gave us a flooring that is completely unique – and it saved us a bunch of money to boot! Win – win – win! 

Total Cost
22 sheets of plywood @ $32/sheet = $704
17 quarts of stain @16.30/quart = $276
5 gallons of Poly @ $12/gallon = $60
TOTAL = $1040

Square Feet
22 Sheets * 32 sq. ft./sheet = 704 sq. ft.

$1040 / 704 sq. ft. = $1.47 per sq. ft.

The Down-side to Plywood Flooring

The only negative I saw with plywood floor planks 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 Plywood Plank Flooring Thickness

The plywood plank flooring thickness we used is 1/2″ thick. If our floors weren’t so uneven we could have used 3/4″, but the flexibility that a 1/2″ plywood has was perfect to conform to our uneven sub-floor’s contours. 

I think an added benefit to the 1/2″ plywood is that the spaces in between the planks doesn’t hold dirt as easily.

It may sound like that’s a bit of a stretch but I think if it was 3/4″ plywood, the extra 1/4″ of plywood thickness may make it harder for a vacuum to suck out things that get stuck in the spaces.

We weren’t sure how the spaces were going to fair with dust and things falling in them but so far so good – nothing a good vacuuming can’t fix. 🙂

Other than things possibly getting stuck in the spaces between the planks, I don’t see any reason you can’t use 3/4″ thick plywood for your plank flooring. That being said, I also don’t really see a benefit to using it over 1/2″ plywood.

The Plywood Plank Width

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 8 inch or even 12 inch boards. We didn’t want to make them that wide because we felt it made it 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).

The Type Of Plywood We Used

Some Before Pics

How Much Plywood Do You Need

Prepping the Subfloor

Subfloor Painting

Cutting The Plywood Into Planks

The Best Saw Blade To Use

We had 10 sheets of plywood to cut into wide plywood planks. 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, very wrong.

Do Not Use A Plywood Blade – Use a Cross Cut Blade instead

The plywood blade didn’t last very long and took a lot of effort to go through the plywood. It started smoking and having a lot more difficulty cutting barely halfway 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. 

If you want to get the same cross cut blade I used, just click the picture below.

The Jig

For more info on the jig and some extra tips on cutting the planks check out this post, 3 Time Saving Tips For DIY Plank Plywood Floors.

Sanding Each Plank

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 plywood you will be blown away at how good it looks.

In the end, the most beautiful planks were the ones with imperfections.

Distressing The Plywood Plank Flooring

Adding Even More Character – Burning The Plywood Boards

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

We Chose Gel Stain, This is Why

The Gel Stain We Chose

Staining Plywood Floors

Applying The Finish

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 was perfect for our project because it didn’t change the color of the stain, dried quickly and best of all – it’s oderless!

If you’ve ever done any sort of polyurethane project. you know that the smell from polyurathane is no joke… and it lingers for days and days. This has no smell at all!

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

Three thin coats of poly were applied on all the boards, including the sides of the boards. Between each coat, we waited about 2 hours before applying the next coat.

We then waited 24 hours after the last coat before installing the boards.

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

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

We used 2 gallons of polyurethane for our project.

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 and prevent the buckling that the previous floor suffered from.

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 Plywood Planks

Make Sure To Space Out The Seams

Cutting The Plywood 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

One More Note

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 to do the plywood plank floors – 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.

Some Pictures

Here’s some more pics of the work in progress and the finished plywood plank flooring.

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

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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