. If your flooring guy won't "bless" radiant heat with wood floors, find another guy to do it. Wood expansion / contraction is with humidity, very little expansion / contraction with temperature. Besides, if you think about it, the floor really doesn't get any warmer than it would on a hot summer day. Floor should never exceed MAYBE 85 deg F. I've got nothing BUT hardwood flooring and radiant heat throughout; and no problems of any kind after 9 years. Some of it's even maple; which tends to do more expansion / contraction with humidity than oak and others. I've got 3/4" plywood subfloor beneath it; and used aluminum plates under the subfloor. Works VERY well, I'm in central New York state where it gets COLD in winter . . . how well yours performs will depend greatly on how well insulated your place is. The rumor that radiant heat will "cook" and dry out hardwood flooring just won't die . . . . . . Bob

wow, thanks for all the help! I can see that the different adjacent woods look good in your posted pictures only because they are quite differentn from each other, not sure that I want to go too light on the new wood because it would be to "blendy" with the white cabinets. A border is an interesting idea but my kitchen might be too small to be able to pull that off, I have an approx 10 x 13 U shaped kitchen with an adjacent 10 x 8 breakfast area. I appreciate the comments to consider that the lighting in the kitchen might be quite different from the hallway. That is true but I did not think of the hallway as being dark until we had the flooring changed and it surprised me how much darker it was after the flooring change. I'm going to find some dark brown tarps to put on the kitchen floor and see what that feels like. thank you!

We opened up our kitchen to the LR (took out a half wall between them) Everything was red oak and really shabby. We also expanded the kitchen and thought we wouldn't be able to match the oaks, so went with hickory laid perpendicular to the oak in the LR and used varied board sizes. I was unsure how this would look, but I LOVE it! It is beautiful and my favorite part about the reno. The two woods were stained the same as we had the LR sanded and refinished at the same time. The difference really delineates the space since everything is so open....SO ..I think you can go with whatever wood you choose as long as they are in the same color family! Good luck! a href="http://s700.photobucket.com/albums/ww4/luvnlife_09/?action=view&current=P4160114.jpg" target="_blank">

All of our "change orders" were via email "credit" for work not to be done, while I (as an attorney no less) believe in documenting as much as possible, my takeaway from this fiasco is that in the end the more important thing is to get the most competent contractor who is also very honest and a good supervisor and responsive and trustworthy and a good partner and then document as well as possible. On the documentation scale my contractor was a 6 or so- not seat of the pants, not all buttoned up. So I have paperwork catching him in what I consider to be semi-fraud (taking a deposit for one thing and 2 weeks later trying to turn it into something else) which was the real reason I had to let him go (the floor stain problem was one of the problems but the bigger one was poor supervision, poor communication, poor work quality by the workers not caught by the owner etc.). Enough was enough. I've since fixed the floor stain via floor specialist, gotten my own electrician to get power to outlets that didn't have it (kind of important for the dishwasher outlet to, uh, have power before dishwasher is installed, etc. etc.), gotten a plumber to move the sink pipe 3" to the left and to move the range pipe up or down to the right place and put the shutoff valve near the wall not near the range (it was reversed... reversed!), etc. So many examples of this. My new kitchen contractor is a trusted time/materials guy who's a carpenter who does all but plumbing/electric so I'm basically the GC now. I'm finishing the job (kitchen should be done in a half week, countertops and all) and will fight with the guy I left behind when I have more time after we're all moved in. I ran into a neighbor - turns out the contractor's partner destroyed a grout job in her bathroom so she has to re-do the whole thing 3 years later, he scratched up her tiles. She is the only person I met who even used these guys, so that was further confirmation that I'm not crazy and these guys either can be hacks or can hire inadequate workers and not supervise them properly which is at least PARTLY what I think happened with me. No matter how careful you are a lot of it comes down to hiring properly. I usually hire well, this was a HUGE exception.