12 Painted Floors You Need to See to Believe

Today’s homeowner has a lot of options for painted floors. For starters, painting is no longer restricted just to wood floors—concrete and linoleum are also good candidates for a paint makeover, which opens up possibilities in kitchens, bathrooms, foyers, basements, and even outdoor living areas.

If you’re thinking of painting the floor of one or more rooms in your home, keep a few things in mind before you start. First, consider color: While a light color on a floor may brighten up a dark space, if it’s in a high traffic area, it will show dirt more easily. Pattern is another important decision. It’s faster and easier to apply one all-over floor color, but a repeating pattern or central painted design can be striking and dynamic. Do you want to do it yourself, or hire a professional? If your budget makes this a DIY job, check out the online tutorials included with many of these fantastic painted floors. With luck, you’ll find a style you love achievable with a little painter’s tape, stencils, and special floor paint to help you achieve a project with a pro finish.

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A little pattern outside a home’s front door can do a lot to make an entrance more exciting. For the biggest pop of color, consider one that’s complementary to your exterior siding. You might follow in the footsteps of designer Gracie Reed and trowel a colorful polymer-based concrete overlay into the stencils for extra texture.

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If you have the space, go big or go home with your pattern! Wood flooring primed and painted white easily becomes a blank canvas for your pattern of choice, as One Kings Lane’s lifestyle Megan Pflug knows. She refreshed her own worn wood flooring and punched up her farmhouse interior with a large, taped-off geometric design rather than a smaller stencil on repeat and not one but five hues including the primer.

Achieve the personality of old Portuguese or Spanish tile designs when you select a stencil that doesn’t skimp on the flourishes. After much success with painted floors in the past, the accomplished DIYer behind the blog Remington Avenue used similar means to update a bathroom with two-tone tile pattern—using ever-durable epoxy paint—but you can also use opt to fill in your stencils with multiple colors if you have the time.

Or, replicate a more free-styling design like these plywood planks marbled with shades of eggshell, cerulean, and slate. Fittingly, these watercolor floorboards that Tanya from Dans Le Lakehouse dreamed up went into her craft room.

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There’s no rule that you have to paint your whole floor. You may benefit from the color and pattern a no-pile, painted-on rug can offer! After finding their lovely wood floors had been marred by a stain the size of a rug, Jillian of The Brick Nests covered up the disappointment with a painted-on checkerboard pattern in eggshell and slate gray.

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When beige tiles in a builder-grade bathroom feel too blah, add character with a couple coats of chalk-style paint. Did you know that it doesn’t require any primer? Plus, the ultra-matte finish complements today’s trendy matte hook hardware while letting pops of accent color sing, as seen in this bathroom redone in large abstract florals by Mallory and Savannah of Classy Clutter with Rust-Oleum’s Chalked.

One indisputable benefit of painted floors is the look of hand-painted tile without the cost of tile—especially when you consider that the larger the surface, the more tile you’d need. That equation that led Dabito to cover his 300 square feet of concrete with a Moroccan-inspired angle-filled stencil in two colors of Sherwin Williams’ outdoor latex paint: Adriatic Sea and In The Navy.

Yes, chalk paint cures all, as evidenced by this kitchen transformation’s graphite-and-white painted tiles. The original Annie Sloan’s chalk paint applies as easily to flooring as it does cabinets—with only a wash to prep—when you top your work with the brand’s extra-durable paint lacquer. Flipping a triangle-filled stencil every other tile in a row allowed The Kitchn editor Jessica to create a simple diamond-filled pattern on a larger scale.

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Choosing three relatively monochromatic colors is key to creating a successful buffalo check on your painted floors: one for the horizontal lines, another for vertical lines, and a third for where they cross. Then, if you’re covering square tiles, use what you can see of your grout lines to your advantage as a slight shortcut when taping out the intersecting lines seen in buffalo check. Becky uncomplicates the DIY process at The Other Side of Neutral.

Rather than attempt to mask wear and tear altogether with a thick coat of paint, you might opt to enhance its character. The bloggers and Etsy shop owners at Vanhook at Co. utilized Annie Sloan’s chalk paint for how easily it creates a distressed look on wood, and the chosen checkerboard design instills farmhouse vibes.

Sure, an outdoor rug is already designed to be low-maintenance. But one that doesn’t hold water after rainstorms or trap fallen leaves? Hard to find—but not hard to make. Laura designed the ideal patio floor covering right onto the patio itself by creating a template in brown craft paper and transferring it in five bright hues from a line of outdoor-friendly porch paint—and you can, too, with her tips on A Beautiful Mess.

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A square-based geometric design in misty gray and dark charcoal brings contemporary character to every corner of this eat-in kitchen! It also saved one homeowner a pricey repair: Instead of attempting to refinish her badly damaged bamboo floors, Tasha at Kaleidoscope Living spent only about $100 on a stencil and two gallons of Valspar Porch and Floor Latex Paint (Ocean Storm and Weathered Oak colors).

There’s more for floors than carpet, tile, and hardwood.