How to Stain Wood Floors Black

I bought my first house back in October, and ever since moving in and discovering old rickety looking wood floors underneath the old cat pee stained carpet, it became my personal mission to sand the floors myself, and then stain them.
Black!

Now I am an absolute beginner when it comes to home improvement projects, but I must say, I learn fast and go about things in my own manner. I basically hope for the best as I go about home projects, and you know what? I do a pretty darn good job when it comes to a task at hand.

When I told everyone my plans for a black as night wood floor, I got a few raised eyebrows, and a lot of others whom claimed I shouldn't do it because it would show every hair, bubble or bit of dust. The funny thing about all of their testimony was that none of them ever had black wood floors done in their home, so I ignored all negativity and perused my mission for black wood floors.

Step 1-
 
You will need to sand your floors. Some will tell you to sand the heck out of them until they are their original pale yellow raw color. We however are using black stain, so just make sure you sand off any surface layers of old polyurethane.

You can go about sanding the floors in 2 ways. If you are crazy like me, you can take a few weeks to hand sand them using an orbital sander. This was the method I used. It takes a lot of time and patience, but I got through it, and it was no tiny room either!

The second way you can do this would be to rent a drum sander, however you can really mess your floors up if you do not know how to use one.

Hence being the girl I am, and the fact that I was afraid to ruin my floors, I did it all with a 5 inch orbital. Yeah, crazy. I know!

Step 2-
 
Once your floors are completely sanded, you now must go about the daunting task of cleaning, mopping, cleaning, vacuuming, and repeating these steps until the floors are literally spotless. For me, this was actually harder than the sanding, because even after thinking every fleck of dirt or hair is gone, you'd be surprised to find how wrong you are.

Step 3-
 
Stain! Now there is this really neat stuff out there that is literally a polyurethane and stain in one. We used this in a color called ebony. However we discovered that this stuff was really low quality, and the finish was not quite what we wanted.

When working with the stain go with the grain of the wood. I used a regular paint brush to stain each individual strip of wood. I worked slowly, and carefully.

Step 4-
 
Allow it to dry for at least 6 hours before using/walking on the floors.

We did not really like the low quality flat finish that this 2 in 1 product left behind, and turned it into a high quality finish by simply adding Minwax clear gloss finish on top of this. I did this by easily working in the same manner as I did when applying the stain.

This literally allowed the floors to shine brightly and look a lot nicer than when it was a flat color.

Step 5-
 
Once the clear coat is dried, you can use your floors. We allowed it to dry for 3 hours before it was fully dry and safe to walk on.

Tips-
Do not drag furniture across floors, it can and likely will scratch it.