Gavin's Dance Floor

In the previous episode of this blog, my builders' insistance that the floor of the Great Hall should be left the natural blond oak colour of the newly installed reclaimed wood was pretty apparent, and their arguments were, it has to be said, perfectly valid.

However, where there is a choice my natural instinct is to go with the historic reality of the building, and at Balintore the original Great Hall floor was painted a dark brown that matched the other woodwork in the room. In fact, without Gavin's and Gregor's intervention, I would not have considered a blond floor in the first place.

What a dilemma!

I am someone who naturally consults with others where there is debate. It's not that I am weak-willed or indecisive, but the more angles one views an issue from, the better informed and better the resulting outcome. I showed my guests the stained samples of wood, and the clear consensus was the stain named "smoked oak". This tint was what I myself had chosen and had found was the closest match to the historic colour. Obviously, I kept my own view hidden for the longest time. :-) An extremely talented artist I know, just clearly stated that it was obvious the floor had to go dark. That was one of the clinchers.

I am also someone who does not believe in "decisions". One tries something out to see if it works. In that way you never make a mistake. This is a common technique in software engineering: you may not know how to solve a problem but you give yourself a hour or so, to work on a reduced version of the problem with a particular solution technique. By the end of that hour, you will generally know whether the approach is promising or whether you should try something completely different instead.

The actual moment I had to tell Gavin and Gregor that I was going dark was rather intimidating. It was the end of the day. We needed to move on the floor, and G&G asked what I was doing.  I mentioned I was going dark, but that we needed a test area and that I would order a single tin of "smoked oak".

Gavin joined together some spare flooring to produce a 2 foot by 2 foot dance floor and he applied the stained wax oil.

Gavin's dance floor

I was super delighed at how it looked, and eventally Gavin with some reluctance said that it did look good but just for this limited area. Because the grain of the oak shows through one's initial thought is that this is just the natural rich wood colour.

I can remember that moment in childhood when one realises that most wood is actually "white" in colour, and the "brown" material one has seen up to that point is actually due to a stain.

I naturally wanted to record the floor in a blond state before it went brunette:

goodbye blond floor 1

goodbye blond floor 2

Today Gregor stained a section of the actual floor within a doorframe, and this was final confirmation that it was full steam ahead. All three of us liked the effect.

test patch on actual floor