How we applied a natural wood soap finish to our wood floors and what we've learned after 2 years

so two years ago we decided to go with a traditional soap finish for our wood floors and if you've heard of a soap finish for wood floors before you're in the minority and if you're considering it for your wood floors you're in even more of a minority but we went for it and so we're gonna talk about that why we did it how we did it and what our experience has been yeah so when we purchased our Homestead a couple years ago um we knew we were going to be having to install new flooring through our house and so at the time we were living in kind of a rural area surrounded by Amish communities so we wanted to get hardwood floors and we knew that the place to go to get hardwood floors was the Amish Sawmill yeah it was awesome my man felty hooked us up it was great yeah so we went we looked we checked out all these really nice wood options and we just fell in love with the white oak floors that they had there so we loaded up a trailer full of two trailer two trailer loads of these white oak floors and are really falling apart old trailer and we brought them four hours to our new Homestead Property we had never installed hardwood floors we had never finished hardwood floors but we went for it and so we put these floors in and then we were contemplating what we were gonna do to finish our wood floors and so we had taken a lot of care to really try to make as many natural choices when we were renovating our home as possible and so things like no VOC paint and just being really conscious about the products that we were using in our home and so when we were finishing our floors we knew again that we wanted to stick with a more natural option something different than kind of the standard polyurethane option that you see for most hardwood floor finishes yeah so polyurethane has pretty much become like the gold standard wood floor finish that's out there and for good reason it's it's you know basically a maintenance free you install it and you just don't have to worry about things penetrating staining your floors because it's essentially just a sheet of plastic that you know is continuous over your floors and so there's that's the great thing about it what we didn't like though is that it there's there can be some uh more toxic things about concerns about it like off-gassing and vocs and things that just didn't sound very safe for our family as we've looked into it more and so we we wanted to as we mentioned look for a more natural just safe finish for our family for wood floors yeah so as we were looking into the different options there were a few that were tempting but ultimately in our research we came across this idea of a silk finished floor and the thing that Drew us to the soap finish was the fact that it left your floors with kind of this really white natural look to them and that was the thing we loved about our White Oak floor was this really light white finish and so most of your even natural finish options are going to Yellow your floors especially over time and we really just wanted to really keep that white light finish on our floors and so that is what Drew us to actually making the decision to go for a soap finish for our floors yeah pretty much any oil will have that yellowing effect on wood over time like we said we really wanted to preserve the whiteness of the white oak floors we were installing and so what is soap finish in the first place and it's essentially as it sounds it's it's a soap that you make that you rub into your wood floors as as a sealer as a finish to your floors and so to use soap flakes which is made of lye mixed with some sort of animal fat traditionally in our case the one we use is Tallow or beef fat yeah we can link to it below I think the brand was earthborn element events but essentially in this process and it's just like making soap right so you mix lye with the fat the saponification reaction happen that's that neutralizes your lie to create soap and so essentially the product that you are buying is just like grated soap or soap flakes yeah so we'll talk about how we mix it how we apply it um some of the features that's known for is that lye really has a whitening effect on on wood so it really brings out some of the natural lighter tones of wood so you generally don't want to use it on any darker Woods it's a perfect match for something like white oak or even like a white Maple or oftentimes for like ash or even soft Woods like Pine is is commonly what it's used for in Scandinavian countries and so it was a great fit for the white oak floors it also just has this really kind of natural and warm feel to it and touch so it's just a really pleasant experience to walk out yeah and if you're researching it I would say more information is probably out there about using a soap finish for um more like Furniture pieces or other wood finishes you can find more information about that um but we often found references of it being used on Floors but just not a lot of information out there about it and so we are going to share how we made it and how we used it but um know that we are not experts we used what we found which is not very much on the internet and did as much research as we could and then did a lot of experimentation and so this is just our kind of what we learned and what we um discovered along the way and so we have a full blog post that you can check out below with a lot more detail about all of this and then we'll continue to update it as we continue to learn because like we said we're two years in but we will likely be on this journey for a while as we continue to need to apply more coats and do things over time as we learn more but how do you make a soap finish so soap finish is made by mixing boiling water with soap flakes that's it so because we are doing our floors in our entire house we had to make a lot of it um and so when you're researching this you will find a lot of different ratios of how much soap flakes to water to use and so the main resource that we founded initially had you using a ratio of two tablespoons of soap flakes per quart of water and so that is what we did when we were initially finishing we did a lot more than a quart of water but we boiled a gallon at a time and had many five gallon buckets filled with water so that came down to one cup of soap flakes per every gallon of water so we'd boil our water then we'd stir in the soap flakes to make quite a large amount of it since doing it initially since sealing our floors initially we've done even more research and I feel like more and more is telling us that maybe we should have gone with a higher ratio of soap flakes to water so even the highest amount that we've seen is a one to one ratio um but even Landing somewhere in between like instead of doing two tablespoons per quart maybe doing more like a quarter cup per quart or something like that um might have been a better option but we went with the two tablespoons per quart and it worked out pretty well so essentially you mix the soap flakes with the boiling water you stir it together and you let it sit for 24 hours before you apply it yeah so when you initially mix the boiling water into the soap flakes it looks kind of just like like soapy bath water at first but after it sets up for that 24 hour period Then it almost solidifies more becomes more like this gel like substance our kids refer to it as snot because it kind of has that consistency a little bit but it's it's almost like a like a porridge or something just a thicker consistency yeah so how do you apply silk finish to your floors and this is something we've just kind of had to figure out as we went uh like we said there's not a ton of tutorials out there a lot of the you know just woodworking tutorials we found just had you know using a rag and rubbing it in and so we just worked with what we had which was just some big like old bath towels at our disposal you can use like um like a mop or there's even like these uh like like kind of um bristled scrubby brushes with like really firm bristles that you can you know kind of scrub it in and work it into your floors with that's I think how it's traditionally done in in Scandinavian countries that might have been easier but we didn't have it it might be easier but we get down on our hands and knees and I use towels and I rub it around and work it around and so basically I'm just going you know starting in a room we kind of clear out a room and um just pour you know pour a little bit at a time a workable amount and I just just rub it in with with a towel and just kind of work my way across the room systematically row by row uh until the until the room is coated and then I go back through the room kind of where I started take a dry towel and just kind of wipe the excess away so that there's not like any puddling or pulling and by the time it you know by the time I'm done with a room it's maybe like 10 to 20 minutes somewhere are in that range and so it's starting to soak in and and dry up a little bit from where I started by that point and so I just worked my way back through that room wipe the excess away and that's essentially how you apply a coat of the soap finish so initially we did at least three coats I'm trying to remember going back how many we did like somewhere like three to five coats per room um initially and because it just really soaks in there if you're using bare wood especially it's you know it's going to soak in and and basically you're you're filling the pores of the wood with with the soap which is gonna help to make it more of kind of an impenetrable finish and so that's that's what we did initially and that seemed to apply a really good finish to start but since then we've we've learned some things about silk finished floors yeah so it probably would have been more ideal ideally to to do that three to five coats and then continue to apply a coat of the soap finish about once a week for the first few months to really give it a nice good seal on the floor um we didn't do that at the time we were having a baby and had just had a lot of other things going on and so we did our first three to five coats and then we honestly haven't finished them again for two years so we had plans of doing it at least a couple times a year that was what we were planning on doing but life happened and we didn't apply any any more soap finish um for two years and they they've held up pretty well yeah so kind of what you hear about soap finished floors is you're really supposed to be applying you know a coats of the soap pretty regularly um you know even as much as like once a month we were thinking like quarterly or maybe even just twice a year would would be good um but we're probably gonna try and stick to more of that schedule now just to kind of give them a Fresh coat and seal but we definitely didn't do that and they still held up decently well but some of the things that we've learned with soap finished floors is that for one you just need to sort of embrace the messiness of it and that your floors aren't always going to be perfect and pristine the soap finish isn't the same type of seal as like a polyurethane or even an oil finish it's not impenetrable it's not waterproof so you'll see spots and things and scratches especially like oil stains like if you if I drew like I'm cooking and some grease spills out about our kitchen is definitely the area that's gotten hit the hardest and so just those like oil stains just soak in really fast and will leave marks yeah but another thing we've learned is that the floors themselves are fairly easy to repair over time when things like that do happen so every time you apply a coat of that soap finish it has that same kind of whitening bleaching effect on the floors and so it will kind of renew refresh the the Finish you may have to do a little bit of sanding in some areas like in the kitchen especially where we said it was really high traffic and a lot of spills and splatters and things happened and there was a lot of spots in the kitchen on the floors over these two years I did do kind of a light sand in some areas then I went in and refinished it and they turned out looking pretty good again yeah so do we like it are we happy that we chose soap finish and I think overall the answer is yes like like I think we are happy with the way our floors look I would say that especially initially it kind of felt like we were walking on eggshells you know anytime the kids like spilled a little bit of water we were like wipe it up wipe it up right away because we just didn't really know how it was gonna react um to to those sorts of spills and stuff like that but we've kind of embraced over time like Jim said the fact that little spills are okay we wipe them up as quickly as we can and take care of them but really once we go back and apply another coat it really takes care of kind of getting rid of any little marks or stains that are there so like we said we're gonna link to a blog post below and you should definitely go and check that out because we're gonna do kind of a more thorough overview of you know how how we applied it and even just some of the the maintenance things we've learned about it how to maintain it over time because there are things about you know how how it's best to get out stains things like thing things like that and we're also going to have if you're considering soap finish for your floors we're going to have a couple other alternative options that aren't so finished that are more natural finish options some of the ones that we had considered or even have since discovered that are really good non-toxic finishes for floors in your home and so we'll have some more information on that yeah so like we said we are totally not experts on soap finishes and we we plan to continue using this for our floors so if you know things about soap finishes we would love to hear any input advice or wisdom that you have share it with us in the comments below if you have questions leave them there we'll try to answer as best as we can or at least help each other out as we kind of delve down this soap finish path and try to learn how to do it and so thanks so much for watching today and we'll see you next time foreign [Music]

Channel: From Scratch Farmstead

Views: 7,035

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Id: Inn_B0FrY-I

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023