rm54, I suggest you go to home depot or a place that sells a wide variety of flooring and look at the options. Look at laminate, engineered hardwood, prefinished hardwood. You'll see a variety of textures. It may help you appreciate the nuances in your unique floor. Sometimes you have to look at things with different eyes and appreciate the character. I am two coats of water based poly away from refinishing my solid red oak floors and I made every mistake in the book. But they don't look that bad. My floors are randomly uneven, dented, scratched and splotchy, but when the first two coats of poly went on, they actually looked nice and on trend. Today I went to Home Depot and touched the wide variety of flooring they had and compared it to mine. I like mine better! I actually think I prefer the random waves and imperfections to a perfectly smooth finished floor. Google "hand scraped wood floors" and look at pictures to see what people are doing and buying. You may learn to like your floors as is.

It looks like those floors have been recently refinished. The gloss level appears to be matte. That is a look that is hyper trendy. This trend has been going for the last 5-10 years (depending on where you are). The orange looks very good with the CEILING and the gold/orange trim. You will notice how much the new gray walls clash with the orange trim and the ceilings. For me the gray/orange combo that you have causes my vision to vibrate. That tells me the clash is in the extreme range. It reminds me of the purple/green combination. I'm sorry but if you want gray in this home, you are going to have to change the following: 1. The stone fireplace - the stone is clashing (just a snick) with the gray you have chosen 2. The ceiling - the yellow is clashing with the gray walls (but working 'OKish' with the current fireplace) 3. The deep orange wood floor - this is a big clash with the deep gray on the wall. These are expensive changes. To refinish a wood ceiling takes ++ effort from a professional (effort and time = very expensive). You either have to paint or stain it gray (not a good idea) to get it to work with the gray walls. The window trim is a P.I.T.A.! Again, it is time consuming and expensive. This has to be done to get the dark gray paint to work. The fieldstone fireplace is a subdued 'mortar gray' with hints of orange in it. Believe it or not, the mortar gray is starting clashing with the dark gray on the walls. And then there is the dark orange floors. If you want any gray in that room to work, you must redo the floors. Or you can change the dark gray to something more complimentary to the orange tones in the home. I'm not saying the mint green was a nice option...but there are better options than this stark gray colour. If you find the right gray, you can leave all the other items alone. But the dark gray you have chosen is not working with anything in this home.

Wonderful wide plank boards! I can't really help with tips, but I would just have them lightly sanded and perhaps protected with a water based polyurethane. If you use a traverse rod with drapery, the cute valance will hide the mechanicals. I think it is kind of sweet.

Wow. We had hardwoods throughout our home in NY and never had this happen. Over the 40 yrs, we refinished at least 3-4 times. They always came out beautifully. Never saw anything like your photo. Once we refinished in August which concerned our contractor who was worried about high humidity causing the poly to take longer to dry. Recommended we spend the night in a hotel and turning the AC down to 60 degrees to dry it and keep the humidity down. We did that and the floors were beautiful the next day. I think the people you used should redo your floors. Jane