It’s a repair, yup. Part of owning an old house. Find a nice rug. Unless you went inky dark, you’re gonna have different shades.

But even though it “matched” before? I guess that’s what confuses us the most. We had zero clue part of this floor was newer. So it just shocked us that now our floors look worse :(.

So we just had our floors refinished

What was done to refinish them?

Sanded, filled?, then had Loba impact oil (chalk color) applied to them. Not sure all the proper lingo, but hired a flooring guy that all he does is hardwood floors.

I'm not a flooring expert and I'll be very interested to see what those who are say about this. But as a wild guess, I wonder if maybe some previous owner refinished the floor and just paid extra attention to matching the different woods. Seems to me that the lighter wood could be darkened with one or more additional rounds of stain.

I also think the previous owner did a good stain match on the new wood when the floor was patched. Once everything got sanded down for your refinishing, it exposed the bare wood. The lighter one is probably red oak, and the darker one probably white oak, and, even though they are both oak, they obviously finish differently. I think it would have been possible to have the flooring match better by staining the lighter wood with a darker stain, but this would require a lot of masking to keep things neat in the areas where the two kinds of wood meet. At this point, I agree that the most straightforward (and probably cheapest solution) solution is to place a large area rug in that area.

Whoever did the original lace-in, used the wrong species. The house has original white oak (darker wood). During the kitchen remodel, the contractor laced-in red oak and stained everything to match. A well done stain job will blend the two species. The problem now is, you have converted from dark to light. With the two mismatched species, a light color floor will never match. You will need to remove the red oak and lace-in new white oak to match or go back to a dark stain floor. I am surprised, that your current flooring contractor did not bring this up to you. They should have known that a light oil finish would not blend the two species. Did they warn you how Loba's impact oil will perform in kitchens? Chalk or any super white color oil is not recommended for kitchens, unless you plan to never use it. Dirt, oil and stains will get embedded in the finish.

I’m surprised too because we would have definitely not chosen a light color! Or probably even had our floors done. They did not warn us about using chalk in the kitchen :(. Although maybe if it gets some dirt in that area it will match the other side better (lol). Thanks for the help :).