I transformed my cottage living room floorboards for under £100 – but I learnt one lesson the hard way

Screen printer Hannah Carvell is one of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing her thoughts on colourful home design for a creative family to live in. See the rest of her articles here.

I have been busy this month redecorating my living room (finally), having been pondering it for the last two years. I knew I wanted to go green and finally took the plunge with a gorgeous chalky-finish Sage Green from Dulux Heritage. Living in a cottage, we have very low ceilings downstairs, and I knew I wanted to go full colour drench: walls, ceilings, skirtings, window sills and doors, all green. It was absolutely the right decision, I adore the finished result.

What I hadn't anticipated was what would happen once I started.

Having not touched the room since we moved into the house, we had become very used to living with a few chips and holes in the walls, no curtains, and a floor that was stained and scratched. But suddenly, as I set about filling the holes and giving the space a fresh coat of paint, with absolutely no intention of touching the floors, it really highlighted just how bad the floorboards were in contrast to the lovely freshly painted walls.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely would have wanted to do something with them, but I really couldn't afford to. Halfway through the project, we (I roped in my husband at this point) thought we had better tackle the issue head-on. Now, I had already been checking the sales on all the online flooring websites, but the reality was that, whatever the discount might be, it wasn't in my budget. It's not just the cost of buying the flooring, which even discounted can be pricey if you want real wood but there is also the cost of removing the existing floor and laying something new, which would mean paying a tradesman too.

I wasn't even sure if our current floor could be saved. It was a dark, varnished wood (in my online dreams, I would have loved to swap it for a lighter wood), but it was also stained and deeply scratched.

So, on a whim, I took the plunge and hired a sander for the day. How hard could it be?

Turns out, it's VERY hard work, and VERY, VERY dusty.

I did put dust sheets up, but they were no match for the clouds of dust this creates. The one-day hire meant my husband was at it all day, and then I helped into the evening. We were still going at midnight, with one slight moment of disaster where we were both tired, hot and very dusty. I was trying to hoover, he was on the sander, and somehow he went over the Henry Hoover cable. In dramatic fashion, Henry Hoover fused out with a large bang and a few sparks. Very luckily, the sander was not harmed, but facing the clean-up without a hoover felt like the bigger disaster at that point in the evening. Roll on the next day. We managed to get the Hoover cord fixed (it's just got a little less reach than it used to), and the clean-up began.

And then we saw the floors. They had come up beautifully. The brown varnish, scratches and stains were all gone! So, for a day (and evening) of maximum effort, this job was absolutely worth doing. We used a clear Osmo oil to finish the floors, and, if I'm being really honest, I am a little disappointed that the lighter tone we achieved by sanding has gone back to a darker shade. They say to do a patch test for a reason – I did not do this. On reading the back of the tin afterwards, I discovered it says the wood will go the colour it would look when wet, hence darker than I had imagined. Now, I don't know if there would have been a different product that would have kept the lighter look. Maybe a wax would have done it, but hey ho, what's done is done.

Moaning aside, the floor is a huge improvement on what it was. It's clean and stain and scratch-free, you can see the wood grain again and rather than a varnish the oil gives a slightly less shiny finish, and I really like how it now does my newly painted walls justice all for under £100. Hiring the sander was £35 for the day, plus the cost of the sandpaper belts on top, which were on a sale-or-return basis when you dropped the machine back and the tin of oil to finish.

It also spurred me into finally buying some new curtains.

I had a dream that one day I was going to make it down to the House of Hackney sample sale in London, find the perfect fabric and make myself some cool curtains for the room. But even heavily discounted, the amount I knew I would need to buy made me realise that I couldn't see it being less than a thousand pounds just for the fabric alone (on sale) and that's assuming I actually made it to the sale and they even had a fabric I liked.

So, I stopped resisting and bought some ready-made blackout curtains from Habitat in an olive green stripe. They were actually a massive bargain at £50 a pair and really finish the room off perfectly.

So, by starting one job, it somehow led to a few more along the way. I may have also started a project in the fireplace, but more on that another time… I am so pleased to finally have a room that has come together and is looking lovely, ready for winter and getting cosy.