You Should Consider Painting Old Wood Floors (Hear Me Out)

Jun 15, 2024

The first apartment I rented as a poor twenty-something had crappy wood floors that were painted brown, a fact I never much thought about until years later, after I bought my first house and had to tear some absolutely heinous green carpet up off our stairs. Underneath I discover pitted, cracked, and downright ugly treads underneath. I remembered those old painted floors, and painted our stairs, and suddenly saw my former landlord’s decisions in a whole new light.

For a lot of people, this sounds like sacrilege—the accepted wisdom is that hardwood flooring is beautiful, durable, and should be preserved at all costs. But you know what? Painting those stairs worked, and made me realize that painting wood floors isn’t always crazy. In fact, there are a few reasons why you might consider doing it in your own home.

There are fundamentally two reasons to paint a wood floor: Aesthetics and for more practical reasons. Let’s dig into both.

Aesthetics. Maybe you just like the look of painted floors. This is less crazy than you might imagine; as Remodelista notes, many charming cottages have painted floors—maybe you stayed in an adorable Airbnb once and loved the look of them. But there are other reasons you might paint your floors for aesthetic effect:

Practicalities. On the other hand, maybe you’re not painting your floors because you love the look, but rather because of more practical considerations:

While there are good reasons to paint hardwood floors under the right circumstances, there are a few things to consider before you grab that half gallon of old paint from the garage and start slathering it around.