Thanks, gregmills, I hadn't thought about expansion/contraction. We're going to suck it up and spend the extra cash even though we'll be trashing a perfectly fine floor. At least it's not a large area. Thanks, Sombreuil, for the suggestions, but we want the oak to come close to matching throughout the house, so plain old white oak is what we're committed to (so at least we can keep 70% of the flooring in the house and just refinish it).

I have done a little Hickory and have seen lots of Hickory floors. I've never seen one with acclimation issues. If it's dried and acclimated properly I see no reason why you should have stability issues with it but it seems like a lot of trouble to use it instead of Red Oak. Red Oak is more consistent than White Oak or Hickory and could easily be stained to a medium dark brown with a slight reddish tone. To get it dark without being overly grainy you might have to water-pop it before staining. You would need three coats of poly to get a nice smooth finish after water popping but the first two coats can be tinted with stain to richen or fine tune the color. White Oak and Hickory both have lots of color variation and are more of a nutty brown or taupe tone. Walnut is not only soft but is generally fairly expensive. If you're going dark enough you could use Santos Mahogany. It stains well. Clear grade Santos is reasonably uniform, has a red tone, is hard and has interesting grain.

PF offered to come buff and put another coat, but we objected it since all 4 coats were put within 6.5 hours and we are not sure that previous coats are good. PF also offered to do full refinish but we don't have confidence that PF can do a good job this time. PF himself does not guarantee that second time the finish will work because as he says we do not have perfect humidity conditions. PF says all his employees are certified and did everything within the Bona's guideline. I don't know how 4 coats in 6.5 hours is within Bona's guideline but he is a type of a person that can claim that yogurt is black. The inspector made a mistake and told us that only one person was certified from PF. After we told PF that we talked to female inspector and she said that from our description it looks like PF was at fault, PF tracked down the inspector (we did not disclose inspector's name to PF), called her to correct her that all his employees are certified. In addition PF threatened the inspector to take her to NFWA ethics boards and told her how much money he makes a year and that she should be careful. PF told the inspector that she cannot work for us since he hired her once and that would be a conflict of interest since the inspector has a dislike for him. He is willing to pay $1400 for the damages and walk away if we sign NDA. I told him $1400 would not even cover our accommodation and moving and storage fees of our belongings that we are incurring because of him plus we have to sign a NDA that will free him from any future responsibly of his subfloor and floor install work. We contacted PF and told that it was wrong to track down the inspector and threaten her. PF denied that he threatened the inspector and only called her to correct that all his employees are certified. Also PF tried multiple times to convince us to hire an inspector of his choice for $500. We said we want an independent inspector. He says the inspector we found is a rip off as their fee is $2800.

Beth H. : - thanks so much for sharing those last two images. I'm working on a staircase in an addition to our old house and I've been using Houzz images to help the staircase maker understand what I'm seeking and hadn't seen those. And I agree, Houzz has chronic "control issues" when it comes to sharing images easily from other sites. I really think the owners have ambitions to take over from Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, let alone all the also-rans, ugh. It's a sharing world, Houzz - get with the program! Anyway, about those images you've shared; are they from Houzz? I tried clicking on them to see if they'd open a post, to no avail. Thanks!