If it's necessary to maintain your house or keep it at the same level as your neighborhood competition, certainly. Otherwise, you should improve only if you are willing to consider the satisfaction of living with what you want, to be a satisfactory return on your remodeling dollars. In today's depressed RE markets, remodeling will not bring you a greater price, although it might make your house more saleable than others in your area. But YMMV! Good luck.

Basic coatings and Street Shoe XL are some big names with big price tags with BIG advantages. And to be clear, Streetshoe produces their own make of stains....and it is often best to use the stain that goes with the Finish. Water based polyurethanes have fast cure times. That means you have full use of the home in 7-10 days. Oil based finished (the one's that STINK TO HIGH HEAVEN) can take 31 days before you have full use of the house (and that's in the summer when the doors are OPEN FOR 12 HOURS PER DAY). So...refinishing hardwoods one section at a time is doable. You CANNOT use the floors that have been freshly worked....so you need another EXIT while this is being done. And once the first section is done and cured (2 weeks for water based StreetShoe = NORMAL) you then have to move everything onto the new finish and then do that last little bit and live with THAT for 2 weeks. Splitting the job ELONGATES the frustration of the job. Two weeks turns into 4-6 weeks of "being unsettled" as well as 4-6 weeks of controlling the animals on the floor. Splitting the job won't matter for the COLOUR....it will matter for the SHEEN. Every time we mix these high-end finishes (they are often 2 component products with the "sheen" being held in the "hardener") we run the HUGE RISK (I mean you have a 99.9% chance the sheen will be DIFFERENT) of having two different sheen levels in the home. The *BEST way to do this (most professional way...the fastest way...the least disruptive way) is to do this all at once. Yes...you will have to find a way to store all the property. Yes you will have to find a place to stay during the finishing and cure time...but it means a 2 week disruption rather than 4-6 weeks of half living half sitting in a corner hoping not to hurt the floor. And 4-5 coats is a bit much. But I'm wondering if #3 is talking about applying a SEALANT (coat #1 after the stain) and then 3 coats of finish. This would equal 4 coats. I've heard of this. The normal process is 1 coat sealer + 2 coats finish...The more coats of sealer/finish the longer it takes to reach a full cure. Don't worry about minwax/duraseal as they are the same company. Minwax = oil based stain colours whereas Duraseal has the SAME COLOURS in a water modified version (same colour chart with the same names). Only you can decide the fate of the floors. The fastest, easiest, most efficient, most beneficial way of doing this = all at once.

Thanks so much both of you! This is the sort of thing I could find too... i.e., a mat that presumably needs to go on top of existing tile. So I assume that's what's being used here too? Do you know of any actual tile (not a mat overlay) that looks like this? I guess it wouldn't have the slats in that case as there's nothing underneath for the water to drain.

“Trendy” is a word that indicates that a style will rise in popularity quickly, over-saturate the market so that people tire of it, and disappear from popularity at a faster pace than a non-trendy item. Whether something is trendy versus classic versus simply part of the fashion cycle has nothing to do with the naturalness of its components. Something such a style of granite can be trendy, meaning that it will burn brightly, but quickly through showrooms, be purchased by many, many people and dominate the fashion so that people get sick of looking at it sooner than other fashion choices from the same era. Trendy items also tend to identify themselves with a smaller number of years. In refrigerators, for instance, harvest gold color was “so early seventies.” Some things start out as trends and become classic. Stainless steel refrigerators are now at that tipping point where they become another classic color, along with white. Almond is an example of a refrigerator color that did not ever trend big. It is often available, though, fifty years after its introduction. It may also be in danger of becoming classic, but it never has reached enough popularity to quite get there. It may yet (or could already have) fizzle out, but would we notice if it did?