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Today, I’ll share how we used basic tongue-and-groove boards to create beautiful pine flooring. This has been a perfect long-term solution for our old house, and I love these floors even more now than when we first installed them.
I mentioned our pine floors recently in my post about the English countryside style bedroom refresh I completed on one of the bedrooms in our old farmhouse, and I wanted to share a little bit more about how we installed them. I absolutely adored these floors back when we first installed the tongue and groove boards during our nursery renovation before Jack was born almost 11 years ago, but I love them even more now. We’ve since installed this tongue and groove flooring in Kennedy’s room and a hallway and there’s a third bedroom that I’d still like to add it to. The installation process is quite a bit of work, but this is an affordable, authentic, and long-term flooring solution that fits in perfectly in old houses and probably won’t ever need to be replaced. So here’s how we installed our pine flooring.
Choosing Pine Boards for Flooring
The wood we used was basic tongue and groove pine boards that you can find in the lumber or timber section of your hardware store near the unfinished headboard and things like that. These planks are about 3/8″x 6″ and you often see them used as wood paneling, shiplap wall paneling or siding. The boards feature a system of interlocking tongues and grooved pieces on opposite sides of each board and they fit together much like other manufactured plank flooring systems do.
Because our local hardware store didn’t have enough boards in stock, we had to special order them. We ended up ordering them in 12 foot lengths and that made life a lot easier since the first room we did is almost exactly 12 feet wide. We cut the boards and dry fitted them in the room to make sure we had the right number of boards.
You could use any type of lumber you like for this project, but I really liked the idea of wider plank pine boards that would look a little more like they’re original to the house and might even get a little more dinged up with use. I didn’t want that super-shiny brand new floor look, because that just wouldn’t make sense for our old farmhouse. The benefit of using a softwood is that the floors will get small dings and dents over time, which leads to them looking a bit older and more natural in an old house. I also love that these boards have shrunk a bit so there are small gaps between the boards in some places, which has just added to their beauty.
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Installing the Tongue and Groove Floors
(Please excuse the quality of a few of these next few photos. Some were just taken with my phone when we first installed them more than a decade ago, but they illustrate how the floor came together really well.)
When it was time to attach the boards to the floor. The way we did it was actually a little more like laying big glued tiles than laying other types of wood flooring that we’ve done before. Chris did all the hard work since I was pregnant with Jack at the time. We bought a big tub of wood floor adhesive, which I didn’t even know existed, and that did most of the holding down of the wood for us.
Chris said it was pretty much the worst stuff in the world to work with, like the thinset that you use when laying tile, but way harder to spread. So he’d spread a layer down big enough for one board with a trowel and then splat the board on top and secure it with a few nails shot in with the nail gun. I’m sure it gets easier with practice, but he definitely looked like he’d been through a war when he was done. The floors, on the other hand, looked amazing!
One thing we did differently when we moved on to installing these floors in other rooms is that we used screws for fasteners instead of nails for extra assurance that the floors would stay firmly in place because floors in old houses are almost never perfectly level and tend to have little dips and bends. we countersunk each screw into the board and then added wood filler pieces over the screw holes to maintain the beautiful old-floor look.
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As it turns out, the floors with the brad nails and the floor with the screws have both stayed perfectly in place and look like they’ve always been there and always should be.
Applying Finishes to the Floors
The stain we used for the floor boards was from Varathane and it was actually a stain and polyurethane in one, in a color called Early American.
This particular product is meant more for furniture than floors, but I wanted something that wasn’t super strong and glossy and might even wear out a bit in areas. Well, Chris got on a perfectionist streak and wasn’t having any of it, so we did end up using a floor finish on top, which I’ll tell you about in a moment.
The color, however, was so perfect that we used it anyway. This was our test piece. I was super impressed by this stain/poly combo. I’ve tried other similar products and the color always seems to be really washed out and doesn’t saturate very well, but this color went on so evenly and really was exactly what I was looking for. Here’s how the floors looked after being stained.
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We didn’t use any pre-stain wood conditioner or anything like that and the color and coverage were perfect,
By this point, Varathane had totally gained my trust, so this is the floor finish we used. Although I didn’t really originally want any extra finish on top, I’m glad we went with it. We only needed about 3 coats too, which is much less than we anticipated, so I think having that bit of poly in the stain we used really helped save us some time and some coats.
These floors would also look great with different finishes and would be ideal for a painted floor look if that’s what you envision for your home.
Here are the finished floors in the room after we also completed the built-in bookshelves, drywall, and final baseboard molding pieces around the room.
I think they bring so much warmth and character into the rooms where we’ve added them.
Despite the hardware store clerk originally telling us that we absolutely could not use these plain lumber boards as flooring, I think the fact that these floors are still installed in our house and looking great more than ten years later says that we absolutely can. 🙂
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.