Yes, it is possible to have reclaimed oak floors for less cash than new wood. Note that is less cash, not less cost. I have beautiful quartersawn oak in my kitchen and my direct cash cost was about $50. Add in the indirect costs, and that floor becomes expensive very quickly, even if I only value my time at minimum wage. It requires tools, muscles, skills, transportation, storage and opportunity. Reclaimed wood is only cost effective if you are doing all the work yourself, not buying ready to use product from someone else.

I can't speak to its uses for flooring, but I do have a dining room table made of reclaimed Douglas fir. I wouldn't describe it as at all orangey. As I remember, we had our choice of stains--what we chose is a medium dark brown, rather like a walnut color. The wood is a bit soft--probably not as soft as pine, but softer than oak or maple. So if dings would bother you, you should probably take that into account (though reclaimed wood will have lots of imperfections anyway--to me that is part of the charm!)

pps7 thank you. that looks beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. That color blue really looks great. I was originally going to do floated but since the placement of everything was tentative when we ripped out the walls, I went with keep it simple "we'll deal with it later". Also one of the walls where I am placing them from floor to ceiling had plaster that couldn't be chipped out. I will put the brackets into the wall when I get a house though... I can't wait to buy and get these shelves up so I can find all my dry goods. One thing at a time though...first I need to take care of the counters and can't do that until I buy an undercounter fridge... Did you have them scrape them to bring up grain ?(it is add'l charge)

We are using reclaimed wood for our flooring in part of our house- it's reclaimed from our own home! Our house is from the 1850s and we removed and milled the subfloor throughout the house to have enough tongue-and-grooved flooring to do our whole parlor floor. It started as 11"-12" wide, 5/4" thick sugar pine (we think, though it's VERY dense and gets pretty red when finished, so maybe pumpkin pine?) but was warped due to the joists settling over time. It's now 8"-10" and 3/4" thick, tongue and grooved and ready to go in lengths from 6' to 11'. We still have to sort through it to see what pieces we want to use (or which ones will go in closets,) and figure out exactly what finish product we want to use. I personally would not have paid to get reclaimed wood for flooring just for aesthetic reasons- it's really expensive here. We paid a hefty premium to have these floors re-finished, however it's worth it to us to be able to keep a portion of the house when so many of the original details were lost. www.greenwoodframed.com