Just putting in my two cents' worth. My tile is Roman Collection French Blue Diamond. Unfortunately, I don't see it anymore where I purchased it (tilebar.com). I have maple cabinets with crema antelope granite, and my island and butler's pantry are white cabinets with marron cohiba granite. It coordinates well with them, at least I think so. :) Good luck with your decision! All the previous suggestions are gorgeous! I will probably be building again in the next 12-18 months and have lots of great ideas to consider!

I really just got lucky. I drive by the construction site at least twice a day (small detour for when I pick up kids) and as I was driving I saw a beautiful grey closet door through the window. In our standard plans closet doors are stained the same colour as the floor, so that sent of all kinds of alarms in my head! I parked the car and walked/ran to the house, trying to figure out how I can look inside without being indiscreet. There was a construction guy coming out and I asked him if it was ok for me just to take a glimpse of the floor. He gave him his spare hard hat and let me in!!! So my advice for semi construction builds: if there are other houses in construction ask for permission to see inside. It does not hurt to try. I think the guy also saw how desperate I was. I told him I have not slept in a week (and I looked it) trying to decide on the floors, he had a heart and let me in :)

Thanks for all the very helpful comments! I really liked the idea of using shellac and Zinsser SealCoat pre-mixed, dewaxed shellac looked like a really promising product, however, it is super hard to find right now (at least in Canada). It's either a COVID related manufacturing problem, or I think I read somewhere that there was a bad crop of lac beetles...! So I was ready to explore mixing shellac from flakes, but getting the right alcohol was proving a bit difficult too and would all have to be ordered online without the option of doing a small sample first. I was at Benjamin Moore and chatting with the lady who worked there and she suggested a water-based floor varnish by Saman (a Canadian brand I think). Just letting some samples dry right now, but it is looking promising! I'd be happy to hear if anybody else has had experience with varnish, I'm feeling like it might be a "too good to be true" situation. Seems to kind of be like a sweet spot between shellac and polyurethane (although it seems quite similar to poly from what I can tell/read). Because there's big cracks in between the subfloor boards, and nothing between there and the ceiling below, we're putting down an underlayment in hopes of creating a bit of a barrier (in the event of spilling water, for example, it would just go straight down to the ceiling below), minimize impact noise and keep the dust below the subfloor contained. Spent a ton of time researching alternatives to flooring paper underlayment for top-nail, plank wood floors, so just wanted to say thanks to @SJ McCarthy for their contributions on other posts which were very helpful. I've ordered QuietWalk and hoping that will fit the bill. QuietWalk Plus wasn't available in Canada but we don't need any moisture protection from the subfloor so hopefully QuietWalk will suffice. I called the manufacturer and they indicated it should be OK. Eventually we'll probably add insulation between the floors (it will likely have to be blow in from what I understand, since I don't want to rip out the ceiling and the subfloors upstairs can't be lifted because they span across load bearing walls) to help with soundproofing, but hopefully the QuietWalk will help reduce impact noise a bit. My husband and I spent a couple days removing 90 years worth of headless nails and tacks. Now we'll be spending the long weekend steaming the boards to try and close any small holes, then wood filler, making wood plugs, gluing knots and more sanding. Sometimes it seems silly to spend so much time on these low-quality boards, but I like that they're wood from a different era and can't imagine ripping them up and throwing them out. Nova Scotia forests are being clear-cut across the whole province, so I think it's worth the effort to salvage what we have instead of buying new if we don't really need to. Thanks again for the suggestions and feedback!

I like option #2 it looks very nice and cooler tone then #1 but they are so similar in the link pictures I thought I was looking at the same thing! Did the company send you color samples? If you haven’t already asked for them I highly suggest you do, we got Cali bamboo oak floors and 90% of the samples we got looked nothing like it did online! Which was very disappointing but we are happy we didn’t just order based on the website. What color will your walls be?