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living room Remodeling Flooring

duraseal floor stains... refinishing and staining my red oak floors

3 years ago

Refinishing and staining my red oak floors. Need suggestions!

Originally wanted a lighter color but I think dark is the way to go with red oak. Which do you like best? I was trying to go for something like the photos attached.

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Comments (3)

PRO
Diana Bier Interiors, LLC
3 years ago
I'm assuming the first photo is your floor and the rest are from pinterest or something. Personally, I'd go with the one in the upper right, which looks like the existing color. It's a nice medium-toned neutral brown, which looks the most like a beautiful wood. Not a fan of gray or blue wood floors.
SJ McCarthy
3 years ago
If you like your current colour then go ahead and put down a new version of it. If you want something different then I would go lighter. I love the look of red oak in the 'buff'. It is a pretty wheat/sand coloured wood.

So long as you work with a high-end water based polyurethane that does NOT yellow, you will have a very pretty 'pale wood' floor without much effort.

Your existing finish appears to be oil based (or oil modified) which makes the floor yellow. The strong gold tones in your wood right now = the finish.

Did your refinisher apply a coat of FINISH over your colour samples? If they did NOT....then you are picking BLIND. And I mean screaming and crying and tearing your hair because your beautiful gray floors turned to a muddy orange mess. Not good.

Do you see the pale colour of the raw wood? You can keep that colour (very close to it) with 3 coats of water based polyurethane like Bona Traffic HD. Keep the gloss level a snick on the low side (satin is a nice low-gloss option) and you keep that pretty 'swedish blonde' look.
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Too many samples here.. And whatever you choose will change based on location, lighting, surrounding colors, etc, and that will vary throughout your home. I also like using a stain without a custom mix. If you have to re-do a small section later, there's no problem matching. Choose something you like and don't stress about how it appears in one particular spot; the overall effect is far more important. FWIW, we redid our red oak floors using weathered oak and couldn't be happier. We were looking for something that added a little grey but still looked natural, and it does exactly that. Good luck!
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Lol -- get out of my brain! We had a hickory engineered hardwood floor very much like that in our previous home (see pic) and I loved it too. This was our previous home: But I hope you're just leaning toward mid-brown rather than attempting to get too close to the pic you posted, since it features hickory vs. red oak, it's wide plank, it's hand-scraped, etc. Now, both of us are dealing with a very different beast. No matter what color stain you choose, it's going to have a red cast unless you go very dark or take extra measures to reduce the red. There's a two-step product called Bona Red Out that can be applied to the raw wood after sanding, and it will neutralize a lot of the red and pink. You can also select a stain that has some green in it, since green is red's opposite on the color wheel. Since you like Jacobean, you could try mixing it with Duraseal Silvered Gray (a light color), and with Rustic Beige (a little darker), and with Provincial (darker, but still with a cool/ashy undertone).
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Elle
9 months ago
last modified: 9 months ago
Hi can you tell me what stain you ended up going with? I am facing this question right now. I have red oak floors that I don't want to come out reddish or yellowish myself. Did you end up mixing two stain colors together? I am wondering if that would be a good option for us.

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