Keeping carpet clean is tough. I have found guests subtly protest against taking their shoes off.. New guests or clients are happy to take their shoes off (I'm a photographer so clients come to my home for meetings) but friends can be rude 'oh what? are you serious? you want my shoes off?' that annoys me I have 2 cats. Ugh! Pet stains = Ugh! I am a germofobe.. Well I'll kiss my kitties.. otherwise if I was THAT much a germafobe I wouldn't have cats.. but one of them has a thyroid disorder and sometimes the poor little guy vomits. My mistake has been spending a lot of money testing different carpet cleaning products, and a lot of the time sponging the carpet clean with such products would create a bigger mess or spread the stain! Ikea sell $15 metre square colorful rugs. I bought 6.. black, red, pink, yellow, green, blue when they are laid next to eachother it looks like one big rug, and this has helped a lot. Its so easy to wash one rug when a cat pukes, than it is to wash the actual carpet I have discovered that Vinegar is a bit of a miracle washer! If I clean the cat vomit with vinegar I get better results than ANY product from the shelves. I recently didn't realise that a lemon fell from my shopping bag behind a polyester ikea crate full of clothes, and the lemon had developed that dusty black mould and the mould dropped to the carpet It vaccumed up easily but I washed that part of the carpet by hand with cloudy ammonia. I read online that ammonia kills germs like mould. I seem to have made a big water stain though which I'm annoyed about I paid a local carpet cleaner guy $100 which was a bargain for a 2 room clean of a 1 bedroom apartment. The people I hired last year charged me $140 as they wanted extra money to come up one flight of stairs. This man was lovely. Even though I vac twice a week and mop almost daily, his industrial machine got up 2 large handfuls of cat hair!!! He said the minute I told him I had pets over the phone, he brought his special equipment. Unfortunately I messed up the carpet where I used the cloudy ammonia. There's just some darker markings like water staining, so I'm trying the watered down laundry soap routine this time

I like a bright house. We have lots of windows and french doors and lighter shades of paint. Only our entry door is stained, and it is in a surround-sidelights that is painted. All our doors, frames, window casings, baseboards, etc. are BM 'white linen'. We are empty nesters in a traditional style house (not craftsman, etc.). The only 'little destroyer' visiting frequently is one grandson, age 3.5. I think our less expensive but solid manufactured wood doors and our trim can be repainted many times for what we would have spent on wood worthy of staining. An FYI about your cherry kitchen cabinets: I was told they tend to darken with age.

I don't mind going somewhere besides the big box stores at all, we have a bunch of independent paint stores, hardware stores, and even a couple high-end woodworking-supply places to choose from. Is the SW stuff you mean "Wood Classics® FastDry Oil Varnish"? (My local SW store is staffed by twits who make Clint's buddy Clyde look intellectual, so if you don't know exactly what you want when you go in you might as well not bother going in at all.) It's confusing because they also have "polyurethane varnish". I thought regular varnish was harder to apply nicely than poly, and less durable - thus the frequent transition over to poly in the first place? I notice on the SW varnish's data sheet that they say to apply when humidity is below 85%... we're expected to have rain for the next ten days. Is that simply a factor of extended drying time or does it have a more significant effect than that? I don't think I can push my handyman off until the rain stops without waiting for his convenience to restart. We don't have a dehumidifier, and we are going to need windows open for ventilation anyway! If it's just a question of slower drying (say overnight instead of the 4 hours they say) that would be doable.

Do you know which brand of stain your guys are using? No matter what you will probably see some red in the individual boards that are naturally red, but I think you can find a happy balance with a little stain mixing. just make sure you do a large sample directly on the floor, the little swatches or small sample spots less than a sq ft dont do justice as you have come to find out.