Our story so far: We stained the floor of the main room in the old Methodist church we were converting into a home with Golden Oak. And we hated the orangey result. So we went back to the drawing board.

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Tyler and his hired man St. Johnny spent another week—and the money to rent sanders and buy sanding paper—sanding away a thousand square feet of Golden Oak. (At least the seams were filled—we wouldn’t have to perform that step again.)

Another stain color was required. The Douglas fir by itself was too red, so we couldn’t go with the natural polyurethane-only look we chose for the maple in the bedroom and the pine upstairs.

This time, we went to Sherwin Williams together. With a sample of Douglas fir flooring. The clerk—the one who had already mixed three different samples for me—was fresh out of gallons of clear base stain. He couldn’t mix any colors for us. He sent us down the road to the next Sherwin Williams, and along the way, Tyler suggested we try a stain-polyurethane mix which, in theory, would be more sheer than stain alone.

We took our wood sample into a Menards (which still carried the Minwax brand that Home Depot was feuding with Sherwin Williams about), and we asked the clerk in the paint department (who was surprisingly well-versed about staining wood floors) to test a couple of colors of 1-Step wood stain + polyurethane on our sample of Douglas fir.

We walked out with five gallons of Acorn Brown 1-Step.

It was significantly darker than Golden Oak, but definitely not orange. It did not dawn on me until much later that, huh, acorns grow into oaks (hopefully not golden oaks).

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Tomorrow: The sanctuary floor in Acorn Brown, revealed. Check it out here.