Hi Caroline, your flooring looks beautiful! Thanks for posting that the step up works fine in a real life situation. My meeting with the prospective KD was one of those times where when someone I think is a purported expert (him) says something and makes me wonder "gee, he's seen a lot of kicthens, he must know what's right". And I get steered down a path that is less than how great it could be. It's a reason I love reading the threads here--they are from real people who speak from actually living in their spaces day to day. Hi artemis, what's your dining room flooring? If you've already got about an inch upstep up to the kitchen's tile floor, then by removing the tile and using the flooring that's under the tile, I think you'd solve that existing issue. Have you've tried taking up a tile and seeing if it really is the subfloor that the tile is sitting on? From the floor height descriptions, it almost sounds like someone laid the tile on top of the original kitchen flooring (which would have been the same height as the dining room flooring and the tile now makes it 3/4" higher.)

Have you ever thought to even look at luxury vinyl plank. It’s durable in so many patterns of wood grain. Actually better yet- have you checked with any architectural salvage places near you to see if they can give you a source or have some of the wood flooring you need. There are those to go salvage everything they can before building and homes get demolished. My daughter just got on contract tonight for a 1912 craftsman that was just renovated. There are details not period appropriate starting with the front door- they put in an oval glass door( LOL) the side porch door is the 3 vertical upper glass door. If this sale goes through - got yo do several changes. They put a new roof on - I haven’t seen it except on FaceTime. I don’t know if they put drip edge around before replacing the roof and didn’t add gutters. The stone foundation crawl space needs vents. Even the colonial home I grew up built before 1900 needed a lot of updates. Six months after my parents got married - they started renting some rooms from the couple that built the house in 1951. Several yrs later they sold the house to my parents. Can you imagine- they were sharing the tiny one bathroom with the owners. It was as wide as the clawfoot bathtub. The craftsman my daughter has contract pending on - I found this site trying to find her an appropriate corner bathroom sink. They put a cabinet in there with a round vessel sink- way bigger and hanging over the cabinet. You know bathrooms weren’t as important feature back then than to say you had one . All the money was spent on the public spaces a lot of times for show and toward the back less of the good stuff. The homeowners that built our house in their kitchen had that one drop light from the ceiling with the lowest setting possible lightbulb maybe 15 watt. I vaguely remember cuz I was about 3-4 yrs old. The house had push buttons for on and off - I got in trouble for playing with them. Of course when my parents bought it everything had to be replaced from wiring to plumbing. I know Daddy saved any moldings or whatever he took out cus he said it would be har to find if he had to repair to make it match. Unfortunately , our house had pine floors-DADDY wasn’t happy with my Momma’s spiked heels from the 1960’s putting dents in the flooring. You know when the woman wanted to dress like Lady Kennedy-! Good luck - on finding what you need. Even if it came from an old school or older homes. You could also search out wood workers that also remodel homes- they may have wood too.

We had original fir floors in our 1913 bungalow kitchen. They had been sealed with tar paper glued down with some kind of black glue. Both tar paper and glue passed asbestos tests (we used 2 tests at separate labs due to paranoia), so we decided to remove the tar paper and refinish the original floors. We found pretty quickly that we couldn't find a contractor / floor refinisher who would take on scraping the tar/glue off the floor. The best offer was one guy who said he would sand them off, but because the tar gums up sanding discs, he estimated the cost at something like $200 for materials and $75/hour. We wound up doing it ourselves, using citrus cleaner, a wallpaper steamer to soften the glue, and paint scrapers. Call it about 60-80 hours on our hands and knees for this...part of our kitchen used to be an exterior porch, and it was especially tough going there. The parts that were always interior went _much_ more quickly, so you might be lucky on that front. We found that letting the wallpaper steamer sit for a relatively long time - 5 minutes or so - softened the glue/tar pretty well; shorter dwell times were much less effective. Unfortunately I don't have any photos on hand that I can show you, but even after refinishing, there are stains on the floor -- apparently at the seams between strips of tar paper. It looks OK but not amazing -- it is definitely on the rustic side, and if we had it to do again, we might have proceeded differently. One other possible option for cleaning the tar off your floor is a deck sander -- had this suggested to me but didn't get one to try it out. Another comment: if you disregard our labor hours, refinishing the floors was cheaper than putting new floors down: about 1/2 to 3/4 the price of new floors, depending which quotes you use. Still, I would seriously consider pulling the floor up and installing salvaged fir tongue and groove flooring - still gets you that classic look, but with less labor and probably better end results. Or, even easier, just installing salvaged fir flooring over the existing floors, though this might yield a pretty big height difference between your kitchen and other rooms. Hope all this helped, I'll see if I can dig up some photos.

Some might scoff at real stuff next to fake, but I have a few areas of real next to fake in my home which look fine (stucco next to hardie board, real marble next to fake ceramic marble tiles, and wood tile next to real wood to name a few). My wood next to wood tile is running the opposite way and I think it looks fine and was a good tradeoff considering the functional improvement tile provides in combined kitchen/mudroom area and the difficulty of matching 100 year old douglas fir, however 1) The opposite direction run makes sense for the orientation of my kitchen, that is the tile runs with the long dimension of the kitchen 2) Its at natural room transitions, not an abrupt change in an open room 3) The two woods are clearly different from one another so not trying to "match" per se and missing but they are in the same tone family, that is (to my eye at least) both are a neutral brown without any significant grey/red/etc. 4) I carefully picked a tile with some texture to look similar to the 100+ year old original floors. In your case, I'm not sure it works so well. Seems like you have grey "wood" joining with the actual reddish wood in what seems to be an open(ish) area. Also one is sort of a distressed rustic sort of look whereas the other is a shiny smooth (I assume prefinished) look. Seems like you already bought your tile, not sure if you have the opportunity to still change your mind. If you are 100% committed to the floor, I'd do them opposite directions.