Hi all - OP here. Bumping my question to give an update and ask an additional question. We decided on sheet vinyl - Congoleum Ultima in a wood print. Had it professionally installed last week. We love it. BUT... We have a problem with a seam. Most of them (there weren't many - I think 4?) fall in between "floorboards" so to speak, and you can't even find them unless you knew where they were going to be from the beginning. One of the seams ended up being horizontal, meaning, it crosses the floorboards AGAINST the direction that the boards lay. That seam is obvious if you are looking down at the floor looking for it. My question is, what can be done now? The floor has been down for a week, it was glued down, and we aren't sure how to proceed, if at all. Can we live with it? Sure. It is in a hallway, and only about 3 feet wide. Does it make my chest tighten when I see it? Most of the time. Would I be willing to rip it out and start over? NO. I don't even know who's "fault" this is. Any words of wisdom? I know when they discovered the problem, they had already cut into the product and had it dry laid and glued in some areas. So, at that point, perhaps folding it up and starting over wasn't an option. I can post a pic of that would help. Thanks in advance.

Ha, I saw this earlier and came back to write pretty much what Hollysprings said. So, yeah--that. We have doug fir subfloors too, but they were definitely not designed for prime time (original blueprints called for cement tile--sadly long gone!) It was a really common subfloor wood in the West in the early 20th century because it was so inexpensive. A couple of other thoughts: - Fir is beautiful (many of our neighbors have refinished their fir floors) but it is very soft. One neighbor has a large dog and another has a young child; both floors have taken a beating (the dog floor in particular). That's the primary reason we covered ours back up. Better to keep it safe for someone who might want it in the future! I agree that I don't think it would be easy/possible to get it to tan; fir tends towards orange/red. You can stain it but it looks strange (I think, at least--our new-old fir door has a light tan stain of some sort that is supposedly helping to even the grain where there was some variation, but I think just makes it look yellow on top of the reddish fir tones...bleh). - If you like linoleum, you might look at Marmoleum Click; this is what we chose specifically because it doesn't get glued down, so someone could take it up in the future and refinish the fir. Don't know how their colors compare to Armstrong's, though. We do have another neighbor who laid sheet Marmoleum on the fir, so it can be done but obviously not if you want to preserve the floor for refinishing later. If it's already painted, though, it may not be in great shape underneath. (Ours is a mess and would require some board replacement to refinish; possible but $$. The original builders took no particular care in nail placement or matching grain since it wasn't intended to be used as a finished floor.)

There are companies in every state in the southeast that sell reclaimed pine. You don't say where you are, but if you google "heart pine" and your city/state, you should be able to find them. You may not have heart pine, but the companies usually sell varying grades of lumber. I just had to buy some southern heart pine to repair some damaged areas in my 1912 colonial revival. The company was local, so they sent someone over to determine the grade that would match best. It worked out to about $9/sq ft, but they had a minimum order of 30 sq ft. I didn't need that much, but now I'll have extra to make thresholds etc or do future repairs.

I have beautiful inlaid parquet floor in a large bedroom with a *beast* of a steam radiator sitting on it. The weigh literally caved in some of the flooring, crushing and destroying various parts of the decorative inlay that someone painstakingly put in 135 years ago. I'm paying a carpenter to rebuild that section of the floor and you can be damn sure something will go under those feet this time. Speaking as the person "100 years later", I definitely do care and wish they had done something to prevent this. In another room, I'm replacing a radiator. The flooring is only about 15 years old. Hardwood. It's already dented and burned from the radiator sitting directly on it.