How to Stain Flooring with Coffee and Tea

How to Stain Flooring with Coffee and Tea

Hi friend!

Yep you read that right! We’ll be staining our new flooring with coffee and tea! I really want most of the flooring throughout the house to be the same. So we’ll talk about how to stain flooring with coffee and tea, but first let’s discuss what led us to this decision.

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Choosing Flooring

After sanding and refinishing the original flooring upstairs I absolutely fell in love with the color.

You can see how I sanded and refinished the upstairs flooring HERE!

At first we thought we might be able to refinish the downstairs flooring the same way, but unfortunately there are green ceramic tiles that are adhered to the wood floors beneath with black mastic tar glue. This is a particularly difficult material to remove and there is no guarantee on the condition of the flooring underneath it. We can also see from the basement some areas that have been repaired with plywood.

After weighing out different types of flooring materials and spending a good amount of time searching for the same or similar salvaged flooring to the upstairs, but because of the quantity we need for most of the downstairs we kept coming up short.

Why Coffee and Tea

This meant it was time to circle back to one of our original ideas and get creative. That’s when I started experimenting with using coffee and tea to achieve the same color as our upstairs flooring on pine boards. What led me to that route? Well Ed and I have built and stained a lot of furniture. We’ve also tried lots of stain mixtures to come up with a color that looks like aged wood. In our endeavors we were never completely satisfied with the results.

I started researching how to age wood etc and came across an article using coffee and tea with steel wool to create a weathered look. Within the article they had shared some images of the color tones with and without the steel wool and it looked close to what I was aiming for. And thus the experimenting began 😉

How to Stain Flooring with Coffee and Tea

Raw Pine

Coffee and Tea Stain

You can see the mixtures I tried out above on a piece of raw pine along with a Fruitwood stain that I thought might be a close match. To do this I made the mixtures very strong. I filled the small mason jar, pictured above about a quarter full of ground coffee then poured boiling water on it. I used 2-3 tea bags for the tea mixture. Then I simply brushed apple cider vinegar over the top of them. In my experience the vinegar didn’t seem to make a noticeable difference.

The photo below is of the same sample board on top of our upstairs flooring, which is aged fir. I love the variation of color upstairs and feel confident we can achieve a look that is similar enough no one would know our downstairs isn’t the same.

So, starting in the kitchen, we’ll be using #2 1 x 4 x 16 pine boards for our downstairs flooring and staining them with a variation, as I see fit, of coffee and tea. I’ll be discussing why we chose pine in the next flooring post. But for now it’s time to start the kitchen floor demo! Whoop!

Using Coffee and Tea as Stain

I also wanted to mention that using coffee and tea as stain has endless applications! I also love that it goes on light and is buildable. Plus there are no harsh fumes of chemicals!