Painting Antique Patterns on Wood Floors

Mimic Colonial New England with Geometric Designs on Antique Floors

Oct 28, 2009

Wooden floors painted with bold geometric designs were common in Colonial America during the 1700s. This lost art can still deliver delightful results if you are game.

Colonial homeowners painted patterns on floors to mask patched or imperfect flooring, or to simulate wide floor boards where none existed. They also painted checkerboard patterns on the floors to mimic the fancy marble floors of the classical era. Today, painting wood floors is an authentic way to imitate colonial decoration.

Consider Two Tones with Squares, Diamonds, or Cubes

Squares, diamonds, and cubes were the most popular geometric forms used to decorate floors. When you are working with a simple two-tone pattern, the two tones can be two different color paints, or one paint color and the natural wood color, or existing wood color.

The simplest way to create the checkerboard is to cut a large piece of cardboard, or card-stock, and cut that into the size of square you want to use (for example, 18 inches by 18 inches). Make it a perfect square to avoid problems later.

Drawing the Checkerboard with Chalk on the Floor

Find the center of a square or rectangle room in the following way: draw a line in chalk down the center of the room in both directions, forming a "T" that divides the room into four equal areas. Center your cardboard square (corner to corner on the chalk lines for a diamond effect) at the center of the "t", and outline the square in chalk. Repeat the square outline up and down both lines, then, work out from the lines, repeating the square outline to the edges of the room.

You may want to lay down the chalk checkerboard just to see how the squares will play out at the edges of the room. If you don't like your results, or if you decide you want different sized squares, you can simply erase the chalk (or wet-mop the floor) and start over.

Painting the Floor

Other Two-Tone and Three-Tone Geometric Designs

The building-block, two-tone pattern (shown below in violet and black below) can be laid on the floor using the same method as the checkerboard floor. You would cut your collapsed rectangle out of cardboard, then lay the design on the floor, alternating the "front" and the "back" of the cardboard shape for each row.

The three-tone squares design (shown in burnt orange below) would be laid on the floor using a square piece of cardboard (for instance 18 x 18 inches) and alternating it's position across the floor: Upright/Diamond/Upright/Diamond. Choose a color as your "border" (burnt orange in example below) and choose black or white for the squares for best results (the inner background will be white if you choose black squares--as shown below--or the background will be black if you choose white squares).

Improvise a Tile Floor with Inspiration from an Ancient Floor Tile

The checkerboard floor layout lends itself to mimicking tile floors. Colonial-era wood floor painted tile patterns included ancient floor designs visited by tourists, such as the Palaces of Greece, Italy and France.

The breath-taking floor tiles in the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, France, serve as inspiration for an ambitious Colonial-era improvised floor design. Once you have laid down the chalk lines for the 12-inch square tiles (or smaller: 8" x 8", or 10" x 10"), using a cardboard square (moving from your center line to the edges of the room, as you would for the checkerboard floor described above), work on each tile separately, mimicking the intriguing tile designs, alternating with smudgy blue and burnt sienna tiles (see section of the Palace of the Popes tile floor below).

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