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Flooring Design Dilemma

Sanding existing wood flooring to match new wood floor

last year

70% of my downstairs area is all solid wood floor and 30% carpet. I’m planning to replace the carpet with wood flooring (same style as the existing wood flooring). Problem is I don’t really like the color of the existing wood floor. It’s reddish brown (see first photo below). I prefer the darker brown (which would match our upstairs engineered wood flooring). See 2nd photo.

If I install the darker brown wood flooring and sand-and-stain the exisiting reddish brown floor. Would they ever match?

Or should I install the reddish brown flooring to match the existing flooring then sand them all to the darker color?

Thanks in advance!

Comments (5)

PRO
JAN MOYER
last year
last modified: last year
Two different wood species will never exactly match, no matter the stain a[[lied. If you want the match, you install what you have,,,,,,,and sand and stain all all to a deeper shade, and less r"ed. " Going very dark may require water popping after the sanding, to achieve that darkness
Lyndee Lee
last year
If you want your floors to match, they need to be stained and finished with the same procedures and products. When you have new floor installed, concentrate on matching grain pattern and size of boards as well as matching the type of wood. Get unfinished wood and refinish the existing at the same time so it will all match. Then you can pick a color similar to the wood you have upstairs.
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wow, thanks for all the help! I can see that the different adjacent woods look good in your posted pictures only because they are quite differentn from each other, not sure that I want to go too light on the new wood because it would be to "blendy" with the white cabinets. A border is an interesting idea but my kitchen might be too small to be able to pull that off, I have an approx 10 x 13 U shaped kitchen with an adjacent 10 x 8 breakfast area. I appreciate the comments to consider that the lighting in the kitchen might be quite different from the hallway. That is true but I did not think of the hallway as being dark until we had the flooring changed and it surprised me how much darker it was after the flooring change. I'm going to find some dark brown tarps to put on the kitchen floor and see what that feels like. thank you!
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Thanks all. We removed the floor. Unfortunately as expected, that exposed more of a mess. Luckily, no "damage" to subfloor per say, but it looked like the previous folks who installed the floor used leveling "float" on pretty much the entire 700 sqft and in some place as thick as almost 1.5 inches. This made it very difficult to remove the layers of flooring (combination of engineered hardwood glued down and some solid wood nailed down to plywood, which was glued and nailed down to "leveling float", which was poured over OSB subfloor). The demo guy tried to get to the OSB subfloor as best he could but he stopped after 2 days of demo and when the OSB was starting to get damaged as it came up with some of the float. We have now moved on to filling the 3 very low areas with some plywood and then pouring self leveling float over the entire floor to try to fill in all to "holes" that were created by trying to pull up the previous float. I guess I am officially welcomed to home ownership.
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PRO
G & S Floor Service
last year
Agree, install matching unfinished red oak and sand and stain it all to match. Both of your flooring is red oak.
Kathy Furt
last year
Yes both are red oak. Just have theM sanded and stained at the same time after new red oak is installed
Blair
last year
What is the name of the color in the 2nd picture?

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