Help! Just had my 100 year old floor refinished (sanded and stained). One area needed repair 4-5 boards. The new wood is noticeably different. If it wasn't for a piece that was cut abnormally shorter than the rest of the floor AND it has a distinctive grain pattern and color from the boards adjacent, I could live with otherwise slight mismatch. The wood floor guy says that the new wood will change color and blend with the old wood in 6-8 months. Is this true? Also, he could have used wood from the closet to replace the wood and put the new wood in the closet to be less conspicuous. He offers to do this now (spot repair) and split the cost of materials (charging me $500 for correcting the mistake and having to re-stain the entire floor with one additional coat). Shouldn't he have to pay for this? I am worried that the spot repair will cause the a blending issue with the stain, although the closet wood should match perfectly. Final issue is that this repair was done due to the wood turning black from repeated dog urination. He sands away the black, but the stain seems to bring the black back up in small spots. I fear the black will continue to progress like it did to begin with.

The good thing about existing doors is that they are hung and fitted to your openings. If you look up how to install new doors, it's no picnic. With the existing doors, all you really need here is a bit of sanding, or you could paint them as is if you want to stay with the rustic look. A satin or semi-gloss paint would make a feature of the uneven surface if you left it that way. You'd want to sand a bit after the first coat, I think, but just to smooth down the loose fibres. Are you doing any work at all yourselves? If so, then I would suggest it might be worth your time to learn the skills and acquire the tools needed to do this job - it wouldn't be rocket science. You'd need a sander (by hand would be possible too), some dust masks, and maybe some sawhorses for setting up the workspace outside. The wood is actually quite beautiful, and the tone quite warm and pleasant, not dark in a bad way. But in certain types of rooms I can see you'd want them lighter. KarinL

We don't have any plans to put a rug in where the transition area is. The area rug we had in there before was on the old wood side. There really won't be anything covering that space. On the step up area (which you don't really see in the picture), we also had some new wood laced in with the old (from the removal of a pony wall). The wood flooring extends from the end of the tile in the kitchen through the rest of the house. There are 2 boards width plus the step down edge and they actually blend a bit better. I assume part of the problem is the large space. @Jan Moyer - this is a great room, and other than the tile kitchen, the rest of the house is wood flooring (sans bathrooms). The step does suck, but we're living with it. The potential to change the stain on the great room floor would accentuate that there is a level change. There are, what I believe, are sander marks anyway, so re-sanding probably needs to happen. Going with some test stain patches is the best way forward I think. At least we'll have a better idea of what we'll have to live with. I'm just hoping we can get some warmth in the floor color without the more dramatic transition change (it is a bit more than what the picture shows but the picture does demonstrate the change).

Would a ginger stain work? The first is a photo of the red oak floor in it's current state. The second photo is the sanded bow window sill.