If your floor is oak, maple or a different light to medium-light hardwood, you may opt to make it darker by staining it — and a lot of people do. A dark floor provides visual grounding in a room with light walls and a light ceiling. On the flip side, a color closer to the natural wood color may better match your room’s decor. Floor color is the choice, and it should be an informed one.
Stain Options Depend on the Wood
You can’t lighten flooring that’s already naturally dark without resorting to drastic measures, like bleaching. Deep, rich hardwoods — like walnut, mahogany or Brazilian cherry — look attractive with no stain, but if you need to hide defects, the stain should be darker than the wood. Lighter forests, however, like oak, can look attractive with a light stain or a dark one. You may use the stain to darken the floor or to change the hue. You may also utilize a whitewash stain to make the wood even lighter.
Dark Floors Are more difficult to Keep Clean
If cleaning floors isn’t your favorite usage of time, remember that dark hardwood floors are harder to keep clean than light ones; that is mostly a result of the way that dark stain reflects light. The propensity of dark stains to highlight defects also makes little scratches and scrapes more visible than they would be on a light floor. This is especially true if the stain is dark enough to provide the floor a mainly uniform color. A semigloss sheen increases the reflectivity and further highlights little imperfections, whereas a satin sheen mutes the effect.
Dark Colours Hide Problems
When you’re refinishing a well-used hardwood floor, the capability of a dark stain to mask major defects may outweigh its propensity to highlight small surface issues. Even though you can lighten dark water stains by bleaching them, often it takes a dark surface color to hide them completely. A dark stain may also create uniformity within an older floor that has endured gaps brought on by dry air. Filler colors are infrequently an exact match for the wood they’re designed for, and a dark stain mitigates the unsightly contrast. A dark stain may also hide fading caused by sunlight exposure.
Visual Coordination
In case you’ve got a brand new floor of light-colored wood, the question of whether to darken it becomes one of color coordination. In general, a light-colored floor attracts more attention than a dark one and, because the wood grain is visible, the floor may clash with other features within the room. Lightness isn’t always a bad thing; it may be a virtue if you want to produce a frosty impact with blond cabinets and light walls. A dark floor, on the other hand, produces the visual perception of earth beneath your feet, which your eye may interpret into a feeling of security. That could assist a room feel relaxing.