I just wanted to update everyone with our decision. We were being quoted anywhere from $12k-$16k to lay and feather in about 600 sq ft of 3 1/4 " red oak down and to refinish everything so it matched. We decided to rip it all out because it was never going to give us the look that we wanted. And to get a flooring look we love, including the extra demo, it's going to cost us just under $13k for 1530 sq ft. of engineered wood floors. I've attached a photo of a sample of our lower and pantry cabinet with the sample of our flooring choice. Our uppers and island will be white cabinets.

We refinished one half of our house (moved everything from one side to the other), waited a couple of months and then did the other side. It is always a pain to deal with floors. We had to have our grand piano professional moved, stored and then returned to us. That was $1000! My advice is to take this opportunity to do a deep purge. Start doing that now in preparation for whatever you decide to do about the floors. Start with your garage. Get it as emptied-out as you possibly can so that there is room in there to hold as much of your furniture as possible. If you have an upstairs and you are not touching the floors up there, purge all those rooms. Purging those will allow you to temporarily store a bunch of things up there. Then start purging all the downstairs rooms. Fill your cars with stuff to take to Good Will, Habitate ReStore, or you favorite local re-sale or charity shop. Also take as many car loads of stuff to the local dump or recycling center as possible. If your kids are grown and need furniture for their new apartments or houses, see if there are any furniture pieces they want to take. Right before the wood floor people are about to start, move everything you can to the garage, upstairs (if you have one), covered patio (cover with tarp). You may even have a neighbor that will let you put some things in their garage. I took some things to my Dad's house for a couple of weeks. After all that, if you need a storage unit, go ahead and get one. They aren't that expensive for just a month. Regarding refinishing vs installing new: if your wood is the thick kind and can be sanded down and refinished, I vote for that. It'll be cheaper than replacing, and there's no reason to throw away a floor if it's not ruined. We even had broken boards and big gaps between some boards. Our wood floor person took out and replaced some of the boards, sanded everything, smeared wood filler all over it, sanded again, and stained. He was great. He even discovered that the stupid previous owners had installed red oak on one side of the house and white oak on the other side of the house! He had to work some magic to make the stains match because those woods take the stain differently. A good wood floor person can do all that for you. I can't remember how many days it took, but it seemed to go pretty quickly once they got started.

The new upstairs addition is a just big dormer in the shape of a rectangle that doesn’t span the entire length of the house and comes off the back. The entire upstairs has the sloped roof walls but in the area of the addition the ceiling is at normal height. The area was an attic crawl space and never had flooring. About 2/3 of the dormer is going to be a bathroom so it will be a different room and there will be a one inch step up through the door. But 1/3 of the new area that has no flooring (about 40 sq feet) will not be partitioned off from the rest of the bedroom with a door. The contractor thought about using that area as a closet but there is a window on the dormer at that location and we didn’t want to lose the natural light. So the little space will have three walls but be open to the room. We were thinking about making it into a little seating area with two chairs and a table for reading. I thought it might look ok to have carpet there if we can’t match the old pine wood.

Red oak never looks like white oak. It always has a pink undertone, even when chemically manipulated. Expensively manipulating a product to try to make it something it is not will cost more than full replacement with white oak. White oak is a premium choice, and you should be prepared for the entire project to be in the upper end of costs.