My husband and I are slowly saving to re-do our kitchen and put down wood laminate floors to replace all of our carpeting. The process is slower than our allergies can handle! Plus, our son has done his share of monkey impersonations in his room during the potty training process…it’s not pretty, and it never completely comes out of the carpet.

We became really excited when a fellow Pokemon Gym Leader told us about her current project of putting in a Paper Bag Floor.

I kind of raised an eyebrow when I heard this. I was skeptical that tearing up a few brown paper bags and adding some wood glue would make any kind of usable or durable flooring. But after seeing the pictures of my friend’s new floor, I actually started wondering what the possibilities were for using brown paper shopping bags for flooring. Why not? It’s hard. It doesn’t soak up liquid. It is easily repaired. It keeps dust down. Plus, if we decide to put down a wood floor later, it can go right over the top of the paper.

Here’s what you’ll need (we were able to find all of these items at our local Home Depot and Lowes):

• $5 Hammer

• $5 Screwdriver (straightedge)

• $13 Heavy-Weight Rosin Paper (painter’s or builder’s paper)

• $5 Wood filler (1 quart)

• $18 Wood Glue (1 gallon)

• $20 KILZ (1 gallon)

• Water

• $14 Gloves (for a box)

• $6 – $75 Sandpaper or belt sander

• $50 Varathane Floor Seal

Total = $136

1. Take out the carpeting, padding, and nail strips. This went fairly quick for us. The trim was thrown away with the carpeting as it was disintegrating as we pulled it from the walls.

2.  Remove or hammer in all staples and nails. Pliers work, or a straight screwdriver and hammer for those being difficult. Any protruding nails or staples will show in the final floor, so be thorough.

3.  Sand down high points and fill holes. If you fill the holes before you go to bed, the filler should be set by the next morning. The filler recommended NOT power-sanding, but we did anyway (we just used caution).

4.  Kilz it! This seals the floor to moisture. If everything is prepped correctly, this should go very quickly. Again, it takes a good eight hours for it to dry.

5.  Riiiiiiiiiiip! Take your paper and rip it into pieces between 6″ x 6″ up to 14″ x 14″. I found it easiest to separate the pieces into stacks. As I tore, I would put straight edge pieces under my left foot and uneven pieces under my right. When I was done tearing, the pieces would lay flat for treatment.

6.  Getting started. There are several techniques that could work: what ended up working for us is using a 2-part water:3-part wood glue mixture (we found a 1:1 mixture too wet). We used foam brushes and brushed a thin layer of glue on one side of several paper pieces (4-6 at a time) and put them aside for a minute or so. After the glue had a chance to soak in, we started placing the pieces down on the floor overlapping 1/4 inch over other pieces. As we missed little spots we made “band-aids” out of scrap paper. Other techniques we tried include: spray adhesive, and brushing the floor with the mixture, putting down paper, and putting more glue over the top. None of these worked as well as our glue-wait-place method. After the floor was covered in paper, we went back and brushed the top with another thin layer of the glue mixture. There will  be some rippling and buckling as the paper soaks up moisture, but if you not using too much glue, it will be minimal and will go away as the flooring dries. We let that dry for a full day and then started on the sealant.

7.  Floor Polyurathane: Follow the directions on the container – ours specified at least 4 thin coats, with 2 hours between coats, and at least 3 days before any furniture is placed in the room. Ventilate the room!

The friend who recommended the project figured out that it was less than $.69 a square foot.

Our experience: Everything went fine until step 6. We went ahead and did the method our friend recommended expecting that it would ripple and gap. The area of the floor a piece of paper was going to be placed on was prepped with wood glue solution, the paper was laid down, and a layer of the solution was brushed on top. This technique was done for the closet and an edge of the room. We didn’t expect it to ripple and gap multiple times per piece of paper with gaps up to an inch high! We have been reassured the ripples would have flattened out, but we were scared and tore it up anyway, and started over. The second attempt we used some 3M general-use spray adhesive we had on hand to attach the paper to the floor. That ran out very quickly. Tim went to the hardware store and picked up two cans of 3m 90 high-strength spray adhesive which worked okay, but not as well as the other — and certainly not worth the $11 a can! When we ran out of the second can, we did the other half of the room with the wood glue solution painted onto pieces of paper, let them dry for a minute or two, and then placed them down. We found letting the glue soak in prevented a good deal of the rippling. After we had laid down all of the paper, we went back and did the glue solution over the top. Since the glue had pretty much dried between the paper and the floor, we were able to carefully brush on the glue solution (wearing socks so our feet wouldn’t stick to the paper and rip it) over the entire floor in one take.

MVP likes his new floor. He ran around in circles yelling, “New floor! New floor! It’s fast!”

Now that my husband and I have completed the process, we are wondering what else we can do with it. I want to get the brown paper and stain it black for my daughter’s room. Then I want to put down comic strips in various places or pages from comic books in random places. My son is getting a set of street wall decals for his birthday. Instead of putting them on his wall, we are going to run them on the floor.

Have you put in a faux floor? What are techniques you have found that work?