Tips on Choosing the Right Floor Stain

There are a lot of house renovation decisions that are honestly kind of fun to make (like choosing pillows and rugs or decorative objects), but there are also a lot of choices you have to make that are a bit more agonizing. It’s especially difficult if the decision is expensive or a big undertaking and not so easy to go back on if you decide you actually don’t like it when it’s completed. Choosing a floor stain can totally be one of those nail-biting dilemmas that you really don’t want to get wrong due to the time and expense it takes. Elsie and I both had to choose floor stains for our new houses since we were refinishing the floors, and we know how important it is to take your time and answer a couple of different questions first so you can make sure you get what you want out of your flooring.

Is room contrast or brightness more important?

I am the type of person that loves a beautiful dark floor just as much as a light colored floor, but I know that both have pros and cons. Especially if you are planning on doing light colored walls, a dark floor can really add contrast to a space and create a dramatic delineation between the walls and flooring. Dark floors (especially wide board floors) can modernize a space and make light colored area rugs really pop. The negative to dark floors is that they do suck up more light in a room rather than reflect the light the way a light colored stain will. Especially if you photograph your house a lot, it’s so much easier to get a light and airy photo in a room with light floors (like Elsie's above) that naturally bounce the light than darker options that absorb more light.

Do you care if it’s “seller friendly”?

Like any home decision, you can choose go a “safe” route or a “unique/fun” route instead. Do you do a stain color that’s classic and generally loved by a large audience to make your house most appealing if you sell it in the future, or do you do something different and unique that makes your space stand out from all the others? Elsie’s teal floor is a good example of a decision that gave her an amazingly fun and photogenic living room even though it may not be every potential buyer’s taste if they decide to sell their house someday. The good news is though, that if you are choosing a fun or colored technique when staining solid hardwood floors, the next buyer can always refinish it again if they really love the house but would have chosen something different than you did. Go for it!

Do you have pets or kids to consider?

Do you have 5 white cats or several long-haired black dogs? Shedding pet hair is definitely something to consider when picking a floor stain. Choosing a light floor will hide light colored hairs and vice versa for dark floors. Light floors also hide dust and food crumbs better than dark floors, so if you’re a total clean freak, just know that you’ll be sweeping dark floors more often than you probably would with a lighter option. I definitely had to clean more to keep up with the dark floors in our previous house, but I loved the look so much that we chose a dark stain again because I think it’s worth it (although we did go a little lighter for just that reason).

What color is the wood you are staining?

It’s important to know that the same wood stain can look totally different on different types of floors. If you love the floor stain you saw on a Pinterest photo, it’s good to realize that it may have been applied to a maple floor and it will look different on your red oak floor. Especially with light colored stains, any color that’s in the original wood will come through and mix with the stain, so if you have a really red or orange hue in the wood, your light stain will probably also have a pink or orange hue to it (especially if you are trying to do a whitewash floor). If you really want to minimize a red or orange tint, a cooler darker stain will help hide those warm hues. You can see the natural color of my wood floors in the before photo above (it didn't have any stain on it, just polyurethane) before we tainted them darker.

Can you do a sample area?

This is probably the best way to gauge how a stain will look in your space. You can either test the stains on the actual floor once any existing stain has been sanded off (you can sand over your test area again before you stain the floor for real) or you can buy a few boards of wood that are the same wood as your flooring and test on those. Since I had to pick our floor stain before we moved into our house in another state, I asked our floor refinisher what kind of wood it was, bought some boards, and did a bunch of testing in my backyard to determine what I liked on that kind of wood. I kept my top three favorite stain mixes in little jars and then had them tested on the actual floor when we drove down there to close on the house. It made the process so much faster to choose a final color since I had done so much prep work on the similar boards before hand.

What if you can’t find a stain that you really love?

Your best-case scenario is that you open a jar of stain to test it, wipe it on the wood, wipe off the excess and it looks perfect once it’s dries. Easy peasy. If you don’t have that experience though (as I did not), then it’s really helpful to know that you can custom mix your own color like you can with paint! I would only mix colors from the same stain line that are all the same base (like all oil or all water based), but you really can have like 6 jars of stain and just add a little more of this brown, a touch more of that black, until you get the hue you were really looking for. I desperately wanted a dark floor with a grey undertone and couldn’t find a premixed stain to suit the bill, so I would just try different ratios of different browns, blacks, and greys, until I got the color I wanted. Just make sure to use a measuring device of some kind (like a tablespoon you can throw away) and mark on each stain what the ratio was (mine was Minwax 3 parts classic grey, 1 part Jacobean, and 1 part Ebony).

It's amazing how choosing the right wood color can dramatically update the look of a space. Our new home felt so different after the floors were refinished and going through the process helped me feel confident that I would love the end result. While it can seem like an overwhelming decision at first to choose a floor stain, following these steps can really help clarify a direction that will not only help your home look its best, but suit your unique needs as well! xo. Laura

Credits // Author and Photography: Laura Gummerman. Photos edited with A Beautiful Mess actions.