looking for engineered hardwood floors to go with kitchen cabinets. open floor plan so will go from entry foyer through kitchen into living room.

A pale, modern white oak (with MUCH MORE yellow than you are showing) will look STUNNING with blue lowers and white uppers. The ISSUE is the dark hardwood. As soon as you put the beautiful, pale, buttery yellow updated wood up against the '90's dark' wood flooring you will signal you could not finish the project. The 250 - 350 sf of the dark, dated wood floor isn't enough to save (assuming it is the ONLY room the dark wood is in). If you remove it and replace it, it will cost (roughly) $3500. Now compare that to the price of the ENTIRE refresh. I'm guessing it is a small amount compared to the rest of the renovation. I would prefer to see more colour (more yellow) in the wood flooring. You have dark/gray rooms. The pale wood you show has TOO MUCH blue in it. All of your options will look washed out and look like 'death warmed over' in your rooms. A pretty, soft gold wood tone looks AMAZING with blue cabinets. Remember: a yellow based floor can ADD 'sunlight' to a room. The soft yellows can throw some warm light INTO a space in the same way sunlight can. It comes from the floor not the sky. That's the only difference. Be aware that the colours you are choosing are 'like for like' with the floors you already have. With your colour updates, that is a dangerous thing to do. I know you want to try to keep the dark wood, but it isn't worth it. A large dark area rug (imagine indigo blue!!!) will do the same thing as the dark floors are doing right now.

We are installing coretec floors and we are still trying to decide on the color. We have agreeable gray walls and a cherry color cabinet in the kitchen. We would like something light that will not show paw prints from our dog but will also not clash with the cabinets. Any ideas from those who have coretec would be appreciated! Thanks!

Hi Beth, I have seen your super helpful comments on other topics as well and thank you so much for responding so quickly with ideas, I loved them all!! The last photo you attached is exactly what I contracted a contractor for in mat but that didn't work out, see below. You were spot on with your suggestions as a "poured" polished floor was my original plan but the contractor I used - who btw is the technician at a large German concrete company so I trusted him - completely messed up my floor. He was supposed to do a terrazzo floor based on the sample he made me which looked great (photo attached) but it turned into a disaster and he offered to pay my money back but I'm now left with an unpolished floor that has stones in only half of the area and the rea with the stones looks like fly poo..(photo attached). This is the link to the material used: MC Top Floor. I didn't want to go into these details in my original post to spare the readers of this drama but that is the situation I'm in unfortunately. I cannot add a lot more weight and height to my floors so I wanted to continue with the polished concrete type options, BUT the quotes I am getting are horrible, around 4,5k GBP. It's insane and NOONE will do it with a warranty as they say the floor has been messed up by someone else. The best quote I got so far was 2,3k GBP for which they would polish, correct uneven areas and add two layers of coloured polyurethane lacquer which will come out as an even colour of my choice without cloudiness. But there is no guarantee that it will look good so I'm terrified to risk more. I also live in an old building so polishing with those huge machines for longer periods might cause damage. I'm in Budapest and the flooring business is horrific over here, most contractors rip people off and it's a super tight community, they all know each other and quote ridiculous prices. I'm not sure what to do to make it the most cost-effective but still good looking and most importantly usable. Sample terrazzo that was in our contract: And this is how it came out, which is unacceptable, so the guy polished it up and poured a second layer with almost no stones in it. Now it looks like a white subfloor.