Estrella - I like my living room to be the first thing visible from the front door...mainly because it is the one room in the house that I can usually keep picked up and looking good. As far as I'm concerned, a dining room that is used daily should be within just a few steps of the kitchen. Maximum distance? 10 feet maybe? I've never understood a house where you have to carry food through the great room and then down a hallway practically to the front door before you finally reach the dining room? Who wants to carry food halfway across the house and dirty dishes back halfway across the house? Just more chances for drips, spills, and broken dishes. I suppose if you only plan to use your formal dining room on very special occasions and also have a pretty serving cart that you can load all the food and dishes onto and then wheel it into the dining room, then I guess 25 or 30 feet would not be too much of a problem. Personally though, I'd rather not have to trek that far when I realize - usually right in the middle of Thanksgiving or Christmas Dinner - that I forgot to set the butter on the table. And of course, if one happens to have a cook plus a serving maid or butler, then who cares how far away the kitchen is from the dining room? It's the "help's" job to see that food gets to the table still warm and that nothing gets dropped/broken along the way. Don't I wish?!!! LOL!

Wow. Alright. The grit in the finish? Thats going to be normal assuming it will get one more coat. You should only be concerned about grit in the finish after the final coat is applied. Now onto the problem areas. Staining oak dark can br tricky to get it even. What it seems your floor guy did here was added paint to his stain. And i think he added too much. Is it wrong to add paint? No. It can work in certain applications. Did he show you a sample area prior to staining the entire floor? Did you ask him to only poly half the floor? And why did he coat the room and stop the poly crossing the grain? He should have coated everything or at the very least coat it the other direction. If he is going to finish the poly coat it would have been way easier for him to blend that seem had he coated it the other direction. Lets hope hes good.

We used Original Waterlox, which is all we could find in our area. Had I been able to wait, I would have tried the satin for a few more coats. Thus, I can't speak to the level of sheen that might ultimately result on a purely Waterloxed floor. The Original has a pretty hard gloss to it. As is so often the case with DIY, we were utterly under the gun to get the floor done by moving time, so between that and our concern about splinters, we used an oil-based poly (Fabulon) for the final coat. It has held up beautifully -- even in the bathroom -- I contacted the Waterlox folks and they said they couldn't foresee a problem using an oil-based urethane over it (water-based might be a different matter?). Waterlox (regular and low VOC) does have an extremely penetrating odor, worse than regular poly, just FYI for planning purposes. You won't want to be inside with it for a few days.

We are considering getting new maple flooring in a medium color. It will be 8.50 sf installed or hubby can try it for 5.50 plus supplies (nails, underlayment). It has aluminum oxide coating so won't be able to easily be buff and coated later, but hopefully it would hold up a while. I might leave the area rug off off of it, at least in the summer. We think that for the price and inconvenience of re-staining, it might be a good choice. There are two closets and one short hallway, but the tricky area is probably going to be around that step in the back corner of the second picture, it is curved. He has never done it before so...