HOW TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL PLANK FLOORING OUT OF PLYWOOD
Hi there!
Recently I gave you a look at my newly renovated log cabin bunk room in a post I wrote about how to create a beautiful bed.
In that post I mentioned that I had ripped out ugly, soiled carpeting from the “BEFORE” room and replaced it with new wood flooring that we made ourselves from plywood at a cost of under $300.00. Many of you were intrigued by this and asked me to do a blog post about how to create beautiful plank flooring out of plywood. So, here is how it’s done.
Actually, I didn’t come up with this idea on my own. I had seen similar floors made with inexpensive wood in the past, and in fact, I had used cheap pine for some flooring in a retail store I designed. But the problem with pine is that it is a very soft wood and is easily damaged by high heels, etc. Because my bunk room is in a mountain cabin that will get lots of wear and tear from hiking and ski boots, I wanted to avoid pine. So I started doing some research online and found a really great 5-part video series on YouTube by a guy named The DIY Dork about how to make plank flooring out of plywood. He gave me a general idea of what is needed, however, I deviated from his instructions in several important ways. He uses a cheaper grade of plywood than I did which required him to do a great deal of sanding of the plywood, and he cut the wood himself.
I on the other hand used the best quality plywood I could find at my local Home Depot store. I also found out that Home Depot would do the cutting for me. So I purchased the 1/2″ thick, 48″ x 96″ Sanded Plywood at $35.15 each for a total cost of $227.77 and Home Depot cut them in into 8″ widths for me at no additional charge. So each piece of plywood yielded six, 12 foot long by 8″ wide planks. Each sheet of plywood is 32 square feet. To determine how many sheets I needed I divided the square footage of the room by 32.
I apologize for the terrible quality of the photo below but it’s the only one I have of the subfloor in my bunk room. The original carpeting in the room had been laid down on a plywood base which was perfect for our needs. So, we started by making some repairs to the base by adding lots of additional screws to firmly secure the subfloor. If you start with a solid, level base, you will avoid noisy, creaking floors later on.
In figuring out how to lay these floors I also consulted a great resource by way of a blog called The Little Green Notebook. Blogger and Interior Designer Jenny Komenda gives a fantastic tutorial about how to DIY Wide-Plank Floors which you can access by clicking here. Her blog post gave me a great starting point from which to approach my project and gave me the confidence to do it. Follow her tutorial and you too can have beautiful and inexpensive plank flooring.
I wasn’t present for much of the installation process so regrettably I didn’t get a lot of photographs of the process. But just as you will see in Jenny’s tutorial, we lightly sanded each plank, sanded and rounded the edges slightly, and we used liquid nails as well as lots of very small nails shot from a nail gun to secure each plank to the subfloor. Add nails about every 6 inches along both sides of every plank.
Because I wanted my floors to look old and somewhat weathered, we did not use putty to fill in any nail holes or imperfections. The more rustic the better for my new/old log cabin.
However, I did decide to paint the plank flooring with a white, low-lustre enamel porch and patio floor paint by Behr. It’s $24.98 a gallon at Home Depot. I used 2 gallons, costing me a little over $50.00.
Without using a primer first, we rolled the paint onto clean floors that had been vacuumed until the cows came home.
It took 3 full coats to get it to a level of opaqueness where the wood color and knots did not show through. Having several coats of paint will also make it extra durable for all the wear and tear it will likely be subjected to.
Yet, it is still perfectly imperfect, just the way I like it.
So there you have it: HOW TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL PLANK FLOORING OUT OF PLYWOOD
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