Basically, you crumble up pieces of brown bags or shipping paper and mod podge them to the floor. I recovered some severely hideous tiles using this technique. Typically you then stain it some color and put a couple of coats of polyurethane over it and just like that you have a cool new floor.
Different degrees of crumbling the paper result in different textures, and you can easily come up with some unique designs.
Now, this was a room in my mom's house so I stuck with the typical stain, using a dark Minwax like Dark Walnut and English Toffee mixed throughout the floor. In my opinion, no project should use just one color of stain!
However, had the room been something of my own, I think I would have gone with the other option I tried, which is painting it. To make the gray side of this board, I used black, light gray, and white paint.
I used really hitech applicators called paper towels...seriously! I used them a lot like sponge painting. I put thin lines of black across the board and then a few patches of gray not touching the black.
I then put a little white on a paper towel and started to work with blending them. Places that I wanted to highlight I added another few small spots of white. Another really great addition to this would be putting some small pieces of silver metal flake in the paint to add just a touch of shimmer.
Once I had it almost where I wanted it, I brought a thin bit of black back over some places of the lines. You can always use small paint brushes to get really specific results, but folded up and rolled up paper towels worked just fine for me.
Just like anything, you will need a couple of coats of polyurethane to make this a strong floor. To me, this particular adventure resulted in something that looked a lot like a granite or gneiss mineral sample. For reference, I was in geology first in college ;).
With the right design you could easily come up with a faux marble and you can always make it more heavy on the dark or light as desired.
Happy crafting!
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