I’m about to paint my dining room floors and I’m entertaining a few pattern/color options that I really need your help deciding on.  But before we get it to that let me give you a little context. My primary motivation for painting the dining room floor are that the adjoining floors in our kitchen and hallway they are finished with a dark almost black stain and it’s not working for me. Here’s what happened, We stripped off layers and layers of wood grain linoleum (annoyingly ironic). After weeks of hard labor (read: demo, sanding, and staining) I had the genius idea to stain our newly exposed wood floors super dark to help disguise the water stains that sanding didn’t get rid of. My plan was to also finish the dining room in the same stain. 

 Fast forward a year…. Not sure if you have ever had a black floor BUUUUT they are not exactly low maintenance.  between our two cats and the fact that the hallway and kitchen get heavy use, the dark floor stain just isn’t practical because it always looks dirty.  I guess I cold refinished the entire aria but it’s messy and expensive and, to be honest, I’m still not sure I would like it. So I’m opting for a budget friendly and reasonably simple fix. Enter my best friend, paint!

So, Heres the game plan. I’m only painting a pattern in the dining room, the rest of the adjoining spaces will be solid white.  I think the pattern everywhere is potentially overwhelming. I like the idea of doing a modified over-sized tumbling block pattern like the image above but I need a lighter feel and a less contrasty interpretation for the dining room. Again, I’m trying not to overwhelm the small space that already has a lot going on.   I mocked up a few options. What pattern would you choose? Let me know what you think in the comments.  

I’m leaning towards option 1 or 4… What do you think?