Paper Bag Floor

When we bought our house in 2001, it had been neglected for a while. There were so many projects to do and not much money left after the purchase to do them. It took us a solid month to gt the house to the point that it was livable and most of that involved hauling trash, stripping wallpaper and rolling on gallon after gallon of paint. The carpets were a mess, but had to stay till we could afford to replace them. Which brings me to this post.

10 years after moving into the house, we were still living with the disgusting carpet in the dining room. No amount of shampooing could make it look clean, but it was going to be around $500 to carpet it and that just wasn't in the budget. One weekend, in a desperate attempt to find an inexpensive way to fix the floor that my husband would agree to, I came across the paper bag floor idea. I was amazed at the way it looked  in the photos I found and since anything had to be better than what we had, I convinced Ken we should do it. First, the old carpet had to go...

Layer upon layer of total grossness. And poor Ken had the rotten job of pulling up the carpet strips and the 3 billion nails used to put them down with. (Have I said lately how much I LOVE this man?!)

Next, we gathered a few supplies. The biggest expense was the Polyurethane. About $50 a gallon. We could have gone cheaper I suppose, but wanted to make sure the floor would have a well sealed surface.

We mixed plain water and glue to a 2:1 ratio. 2 cups of water to every 1 cup of glue.  This is where you need to put on the disposable gloves and get ready to make a mess...

Many of the articles we read used brown paper bags to do their floors. We went to the store and bought two rolls of brown shipping paper. The night before we sat and tore the paper into large irregular shapes and wadded them up and stored them in some big trash bags. The next day we took a handful of the paper wads and added them to our bucket. We mushed the paper down and squeezed it like a sponge until it was saturated.

Then we squeezed as much of the glue out of each piece of paper as we could, un-wadded them one by one and smoothed them on the floor. We over lapped the edges and turned the pieces this way and that to add a little interest. The straight edges of the paper were placed along the wall edge. And we used a sponge brush to dab some glue to a few edges that didn't want to stick.

It took a few days for our floor to dry completely. I loved the way that it looked when it was wet, but as it dried it went back to the color of the paper and didn't quite work the the other colors in our house. So we decided to stain it with a beautiful dark walnut stain. It was just a quick 'paint on, wipe off' process. You can see how the wrinkle marks and the edges of the paper stained a darker shade making the floor look almost like leather. It was so beautiful!

A few days later Ken started applying what would eventually be 7 coats of Polyurethane. He did one coat in the morning and one coat at night with about 12 hours in between to dry.

We love the way it turned out and after 10 months it's still as beautiful as the day we finished it. And it's durable too. We just use a damp mop to clean it. 

Supplies needed:

• brown shipping paper (we used about one and a half rolls)
• Elmer's white glue (we bought a gallon and had enough left that we'll have glue forever)
• mixing bucket
• measuring cup
• paint stick to mix the water and the glue
• sponge brushes
• rubber gloves
• stain in your choice of color
• old t-shirts to wipe the stain
• water based polyurethane (we used a little over a gallon)
•  a strong back and the willingness to do some manual labor.

People are amazed when we tell them it's a paper floor. Total project cost for a 12" x 14" room? Under $100!