Catching Up

I hope you have missed me. On the home front, I’ve been busy painting my dining room floor (yes, again), and on the business end of things, I’m working on yet another folding screen and a few other fun projects. I’ll start with my floor.

This will be the third time since I’ve lived in this house that I’ve painted this particular floor. I will add, the paint has held up extremely well in all cases, I just like a little change now and then. In this photo, the squares in the foreground were from the first time I painted this floor. I alternated green, off white and rust squares on a diagonal, with a smaller black square at the points. Here, I’ve decided to change the floor to black and white with an orange and green border.

And here it is finished. I’ve had this floor for a few years now and because I am still obsessed with my favorite color, Benjamin Moore’s Silhouette, I thought I’d go for an all black floor. Silhouette is a nice soft, grey black. But then I decided I really did not want to give up my diamonds, so I was going to paint the entire floor with Silhouette and poly every other square, so there would be matte and gloss alternating black diamonds. But… then I got the bright insane idea to use a pattern on every other square and stencil that pattern with the poly.

I’m calling it my Shadow Floor. I apologize for the very terrible pictures, but I have tried to photograph this floor for several days now, in all types of light, with a poor success rate. Just look closely! For the pattern, I used a wonderful stencil from Cutting Edge Stencils called Rabat Allover. And here is why I chose this design…

A while ago, I etched my china cabinet doors with a very similar pattern that I had found for free online. I wrote about this back in May and no, I have not been able to get the second door hung properly yet! My handyman seems to have fallen off the face of the earth.

I thought it would look like the doors were casting a shadow onto my squares on the floor, hence my name "Shadow Floor".

Here are two more bad pictures, just to torture you.

What can I say? It’s difficult to see it in person and even more difficult to try to photograph. All in all, it was a lot of work taping and re-taping and it the contrast is not as high as I thought it would be. I used a high gloss poly, but I wonder what else I should have used for more contrast. Feel free to chime in if you have a suggestion. I may muster up some enthusiasm to revisit this at some point. For now, I’m just leaving it because I have other fish to fry. Also… this paint is taking forever to cure so I’m not able to put my furniture back yet and I have to gingerly tiptoe across it with socks on. I’m so done with this floor! I am putting a yellow area rug under the table, so once this room is together, and if this floor every really dries, I’ll try to get better photos.