The kit instructions have suggestions for finishing the floors and you can certainly follow them if you'd like. I decided to finish mines in a more traditional and a little simpler way.
These floors have been specifically designed to be finished, so you will not have issues with mismatched wood grains or hues that will affect the color of your stain. Your floors will stain true to your chosen stains hue.
I started on the first and second floors today. I lightly sanded the floors first, with fine grit sandpaper. Do not use a coarse grit. The scoring of the floors is delicate and you can damage them if you become too rough with sanding. Lightly sanding the floors will remove any glue that may have gotten on the floors during assembly and prepare it to take stain.
I then used a faux stain mixture to stain the floors with. I went with Americana Cocoa Acrylic Paint and Delta Ceramcoat Interior Gloss Varnish. Together, they produced a very light color stain, since I wanted very light floors. The ratio of the mixture is up to you, depending on how much color you want. I only used a dab of the paint to create as light of a stain color as I could.
Afterwards, I lightly sanded again and gave the floors two more coats of gloss varnish. I sanded and let the varnish dry between coats. This creates a very smooth and shiny floor.
