Beautiful cool chocolate colors with occasional coppery, and occasional golden highlights...

Sounds lovely. How frustrating. All that planning and the builder is an idiot. Agggghhhh! It does sound like red oak would spoil your color scheme... and you would never be able to look at it without that little angry twinge we all know so well.

Any photos you can share?

Does the lack of rails and spindles really delay the whole move?

So I find it impossible to believe it will take a month to get new spindles and rails. He might need to go to a different supplier but it sounds like you have a high end build. Suggest he put the others in for safety then come back and put the white oak as agreed. I'll bet he gets the spindles shipped quickly.

If you tweaked the Minwax English Chestnut could you get the stairs and handrail to be pretty much the same color as the floors? I generally think it looks more intentional for them to match very closely anyway, because the stair treads *are wood "floor"... the "floor" is whatever you walk on. Intentions aside, sometimes different woods like this look like you did whatever was easiest, not like you intended to allow the natural wood to shine through...imo, anyway.

In any case you could probably put a temporary railing up for safety and your occupancy certificate and put in the right materials after you moved in.

Good thoughts so far. Yes, I was amazed at the English Chestnut - it's lovely. I will share pics below.
@mclarke - yes, the stairs are high enough that occupancy permit not possible, as others have aluded to.
@gmp3 - "high end". to me that's a comparative analysis & tough to say. we are suburbs major metro area - for this area it is average custom build, but compared to some areas of the country yes, it's "high end". I feel blessed even with all the last minute changes & mess.

We have had SO MUCH STUFF ripped out & re-done, we are reluctant to ask them to do it again, by request at that. But that might be good idea. DH on his way to pick up small stain cans as we speak to help coordinate colors. If we paint the spindles, to me the red oak will be enough distance from the floor that a small change in hue won't be obvious.

(example - manager went thru the other day & noticed that his trim crew had used the wrong base board for over 100 feet of triple-crown molding - so they're ripping that out for a re-do. They neglected to case one of the dining room doorways - so rip out & redo - which also involves moving another whole doorway. One whole door & doorway upstairs changed from 3.0 to 2'8" & moved on the wall because Draw person was clueless, and 3.0 door would not open 90 degrees after door hardware installed (this we noticed, and warned them, but they charged on to finish, rather than ask us "what do you mean by this?") Their garage stairs were not what we specified - so rip out & re-do. Back porch is a poured slab with poured stairs - and framing crew put the support posts per blue-print but did cement guys check the blueprints?? noo... so can't change supports 'cause it'll mess with roof, so poured cement stairs were ripped off & re-poured..... ) *sigh* oh that I could be on site 24x7! oh that people would communicate! oh that people would have actually consulted the plans!! And my GrandFather had a saying "if frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their butts when they hopped". LOL

Oh - pics. All wall & painted trim so far Duron's Shell White. And we tried to plastic cover lights & fan motors to protect from wood-floor dust.

Coming in the front door (chair rail not painted yet):

View from the other side after they'd laid protection for other workers, but you can tell it's high enough for code that railing must be up:

So as not to inundate you with images, but this probably the best example of color. Every room the floor looks different because of window & reflections, but it's a cool enough color that it allows the cider-on-cherry cabinets in the kitchen to keep their "cherry" look and not go 'orange':

Wow, thanks so much for the photos. Your new home is going to be stunning!

What color will the chair rail be?

We just had our red oak floor stripped and stained with English Chestnut -- they look very much like yours in tone. I am debating what to do with stair rails (I haven't changed them yet and they are a tone or so lighter than floors) but I'm leaning towards going darker -- maybe a jacobean or even ebony with a higher gloss. I would like a box style ballister in white. Just a thought...

Your new home is beautiful!

Thanks all for the compliments ! We worked hard on the design, and so far the space feels natural to me. Like I've been there for awhile already.... very excited to get my stuff outta storage-hock & get out of this temp 1br rental!

So someone on the Woodworking board just mentioned using a wood-bleach to bleach out the red oak's pink tones. I seriously need to do some fast research on that.....

Very pretty, we are putting in 4" white oak ourselves, and am considering English chestnut. Beautiful!

www, your house is beautiful. I love using three colors on stairs. I have seen it done several different ways. I think if you are open to using a third color I would consider black paint or the darkest stain you can find that would work with your decor. If it were my house I would paint the raisers black as well as the handrailing and paint the spindles white. You could do the newel post any of the three colors. It would all look nice. Here is a great example of what can be done with three colors. Very chic!