Someone here has pictures of their natural red oak floors and their quartersawn white oak cabinets. It was a beautiful contrast!! Hopefully she will post to this thread because I can't remember who it was. I did the opposite...quartersawn white oak floors and stained red oak cabinets. Quartersawn oak is more expensive, but has a very different appearance and grain. It really doesn't even look like oak, except for the tone and color of the wood.

Anyone mention the Elephant in the room? Bellawood = Lumber Liquidators. Yikes! Run away! Lumber Liquidators is one of the lowest of the low when it comes to wood flooring. They use rustic grade wood that is miss-milled. The amount of culling that has to occur is breath taking (a lot of swearing going on by the installers). I would stay as far away from LL as possible. They are the Walmart of the flooring industry. Sure you can find everything you want at the lowest price possible...but is that something you want out of a floor that *should last 60 years? The LL stuff is great for low-end homes or entry level homes where the expense would be wasted because the value of the home wouldn't support the cost of 'better' wood floors. Go ahead and find an NWFA Certified Installer in your area: www.nwfa.org Or take up G & S Floor's offer to have a look.

Ok...first things first. Janka hardness ratings only apply to solid hardwood. Engineered planks do not work with Janka because the plied layers underneath are often 'soft woods'. Considering Janka measures how much force it takes to imbed a metal ball into the wood, it isn't possible to offer Janka scores for engineered. They just don't compute. The next thing I'm going to point out is the oddity of trying to match the ENTIRE HOUSE to a single room of existing hardwood. You have a small amount of hardwood that is dictating the rest of the house. It's not impossible but it is HIGHLY unusual. In other words, you are trying to put down more than a thousand square feet of flooring by trying to match 150 - 250sf of dining room (I don't know the size of your dining room so I'm only guessing here). That's a little like putting the cart before the horse. Usually we see this the other way around. Usually we have a house full of hardwood (big amount) but the bedrooms have carpet (small amount). The homeowners then agonize over getting a match for the smaller area. That is normal. As for your price range that you are looking at, they are too low and a little thin. The gold standard is 3/4" thickness (solid or engineered). An engineered product with 3mm or more of wear layer is the base level. The thicker the wear layer the more times a floor can be refinished. The Gold standard is 6mm wear layer (usually in the $10/sf range). If you are having a hard time finding floors that you like, you might want to think about replacing the dining room at the same time. This takes away all the pressure to work with low-grade hardwoods just to get a match to a small amount of hardwood. Solid or engineered should be more than what you are looking at for price. Prefinished wood flooring should be in the $7/sf just to start and they go up from there.

Semigloss will reflect light more than satin, but if there’s no light to reflect that won’t help you. It may also accentuate any defects in the floor. If electrical upgrades aren’t an option can you bring in more lamps? Even with overhead lighting, lamps improve the ambiance significantly. Lighter paint also reflects light, but again you must have light to reflect. Whites really need natural light to look good in my opinion, otherwise they accentuate shadows and make the room feel dingy.