G & S Floor Service - Will Nutmeg come out orangey on Red Oak? My husband would like to go lighter and doesn't mind a golden or reddish tone as he likes the look of a cherry woodd color but I really want more of a brown. Would Medium Brown work well? I would go for Jacobean but my husband is averse to how dark it is. He would probably be happy with chestnut or provincial and a cinnamon colored floor. :-) I would truly appreciate hearing from you as I have to give my floor guy 4 choices of stains to try out today!

Yes...things look different from the sample patch (ahem...assuming your refinisher offered a sample patch ON YOUR WOOD floor) and from final application of STAIN. The stain dries or cures (can take a while depending on what it is made of...like 72 hours for oil based stain is very normal). Then the CHOICE of finish makes a HUGE difference. The oil based finishes (the cheap stinky ones that cause migraines and nose bleeds) turn orange. Each coat gets a stronger and stronger orange tone to it. It can cause white paper to turn orange/amber colour. These are the finishes that get darker and darker with age (oxidization). An oil modified finish can turn yellow. Not as harsh a colour as the oil finish but enough to get floors to turn colour. Again, each coat added creates a stronger yellow tone. These finishes ALSO get darker as they age...but not as bad as the oil finishes. Now for the water based products. These are what we call a 'clear coat'. They do NOT turn orange or yellow. They do NOT get darker as they age. Traditionally they are more expensive than the oil modified and can be much more expensive than the oil based. A VERY GOOD water based finish will be a 2 part product such as Bona Traffic HD or Loba 2K Supra AT. These are the big boys and they can triple the cost of the finish (compared to oil based). And then there is the lighting situation you viewed the floors under. The look of natural day light hitting your floors will be different from evening light with artificial lighting. Go ahead and view your floors at roughly the same time as you first saw them (right after the application). And while you are there chatting with the refinisher, go ahead and take photos of the FINISH or the can that it comes in. And feel free to up load photos with your colour patch that you chose vs. the finish as it looks now.

Pink Blocker will "minimize" your red tones. For light browns, you will not have much to choose from in Duraseal colors. Bona has Twig or Nutmeg in Drifast stains. If, you want lighter than that, use chemical stains.

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).