I’ve received a lot of comments from readers of my blog thanking me for documenting my mistakes. I never really set out to do that — I guess I just make a lot of mistakes! This is going to be one of those posts.

As of my last post, the Victorianna’s scratch-built kitchen was almost finished. I’ve found that big mistakes often happen when a project is almost finished — I try to tweak one last little thing and the house of cards comes crashing down. In this case it was the floor. In the nearly four years (!) since I laid the hardwood, it had gotten kind of dingy. Dust got into the grain of the wood and so it looked like the wood had white scratches and speckles all over it.

I thought I could fix this by staining over it. In fact, I was so confident in the idea that I jumped right in without doing a test piece first. In my mind the stain was going to match the floor color completely. In fact, it didn’t. (Who could have predicted that?!)

Since the whole house (except for the bathrooms) has the same floors, now my kitchen didn’t match the rest of the house. No way I was going to stain ALL the floors, which would require removing baseboards and very likely messing up the wallpaper… that house of cards is about to topple!

So I did something perfectly reasonable: I ripped it out.

Most of the boards ripped off the paper backing, leaving the sticky part behind. (If you weren’t following along back then, here’s how I made the floors from micro veneer.)

This isn’t my first re-do of the kitchen floor. Originally I’d intended for it to be tiled, but the tile came out crooked. I ripped that out and redid it with hardwood on a whim, but now that I’d ruined it, I started thinking about tile again. Since making a backsplash out of scrapbook paper had turned out well, I decided to try something similar on the floor, but with a bigger tile.

I bought a 3/4″ square paper punch and two scrapbook paper options – one black “chalkboard”, and one marbled white.

Continue reading