Hello everyone! This is my first post on the forum... but I have been reading different discussions like crazy the past couple of weeks!

My husband and I have a house in Atlanta, Georgia. It was built in 1951, and we call it our little cottage home. Lots of character but needs a lot of work to make it our dream home.

When my husband bought the house the entire floors were covered in carpet! He got so tired of seeing them that in 2012 he ripped out a section of the carpet and was pleased to discover beautiful hardwoods underneath!!! He immediately had the carpet ripped out and the floors refinished. However, the hardwood is only in some parts of the front of the house (living room, two bedrooms, and dining room). We have a galley kitchen on the left side of the dining room where there is NOT hardwood floor. On the right side of the dining room is our (very big) laundry room where there is also NOT hardwood floors. We are knocking down the wall between the kitchen-dining room, as well as the wall between the dining room/laundry room and creating one big open kitchen/dining area. Behind the kitchen is the addition which is an additional 600 or so square feet including a third bedroom and a now enclosed porch. There is no hardwood undernath the addition, just subfloor.

So the reason for me providng all this detail is this-- Now that we are doing renovations, we've always assumed that we were going to install brand new hardwood floors throughout the ENTIRE house (minus bathrooms) to create a cohesive flow. We visited several hardwood shops in the area and picked out some of our favorite prefinished hardwood floors.

A couple days ago I was looking at our current hardwood floors and thought to myself... what a shame to lose our beautiful hardwood floors that are original to the house. I talked to my husband and proposed the idea of attempting to match our current hardwood floors as close as possible throughout the entire house and then staining them all a darker brown. He does not like this idea at all. The problem is the floors are 1.5 inch wide wood floors which are darn near impossible to find anymore! We've only found a few distributors who sell them for about $1/sq ft. less than the prefinished hardwood floors we're looking at. He's also worried that it will end up costing more money for labor to install unfinished floors (even though we are saving a little because we only need to match the hardwood in the rooms where there is subfloor/carpet). Lastly, he's afraid that we won't be able to match the wood exactly and have a non-uniform look to the house.

The distributor who is able to ship us 1.5 inch hardwood floors said we need to find out 1) what type of hardwoods we have and 2) the grade of the existing hardwoods. I have no idea how to tell. We contacted the company who restored our hardwoods in 2012 to see if they remember what type of hardwoods we have (they had to purchase replacement wood to replace some of the damaged spots), but we have not heard back from them. I've attached some current pictures of our floors-- can anyone tell me what type of wood this is?? Keep in mind the lighting varies room to room. Sometimes I think they are red oak and sometimes I think they are white oak. Then I wonder if they are even oak at ALL, or if they are a mixture of red and white (something that I heard was not uncommon for this time).

And lastly-- are we going down a dangerous path trying to preserve the original hardwoods? Will staining help make it all uniform or will we be able to tell the difference between the new and old floors? I want to keep them if we can, but my husband is adament that it is going to end up costing more money just simply because of the amount of labor required to install and then stain unfinished floors vs prefinished floors. He also thinks these floors are dinged up and old... but I think they are beautiful. Any help anyone can offer would be GREATLY appreciated!

I'm so sorry for the long post!!! I just figured the more detail I could provide, the better. Thank you all SO much!