Appreciate the responses. Do I need to worry about adequate expansion room for the new hardwood if I don't remove the existing baseboards and just use shoe molding? We had the house built 20 years ago and the hardwood and carpets were installed underneath the 4.5 inch baseboards. I really don't care to lose a portion of the height of my baseboards by using quarter round or shoe molding. This would result in a "mismatched" look when compared to the baseboards in my other rooms. My preference is to have the baseboards removed prior to the new floor installation. I just have to decide if it makes more sense to try to preserve the original baseboards for re-installation or have new baseboards installed and painted. Here are some pics of the trim and baseboards in the 2 rooms that will have hardwood installed. Both rooms were recently painted, but I don't mind repainting baseboards as long as I get the best quality installation of the new floors and baseboards that look like these again when done. Dining Room Great Room

Okay. I gave up, and called in the pros... They used a professional floor scraper (basically, a large razor blade on a long stick) to get the lino up, and then used a giant sander with 24 grit sandpaper to get the tar up. They also told me that it is NOT asbestos - just plain old tar. After 8 months of me and my neighbor and his friends scraping, scraping, scraping... it took the pros about two hours. It looks AMAZING. I am thrilled. Its only just been sanded - I'm waiting on the matching heart pine I ordered to patch it, and then they'll put the finish on it. It's costing me $1200 for scraping, sanding, and finishing, plus an extra $400 for the patch work (including ripping the 5" boards down to fit in my 3 1/4" floor). The heart pine boards to patch? $38 a box, times two boxes. And to tell you the truth? Totally worth it. And it should be done after three days of work. Three days! I have been up all night every night in the last week stressing about the darn floor - the idiots my neighbor got to work on it (supposedly pros) damaged it, and I was sure it was just ruined. Now I can finally get some sleep. That right there is worth the money.

@DavidR....the reason why we advise against painting subfloors is it causes issues with permanent flooring choices later on. Example: A glue down ANYTHING (including glued carpet) has a chemical reaction (bond failure) to the paint or the urethane sitting on the subfloor. A tile floor has bonding issues with paint = need a new subfloor surface. Vinyl has chemical reactions to polyurethane/urethane to the point that the two chemicals will stain EACH OTHER (that's right....the urethane will stain the vinyl above and the vinyl will stain the wood underneath the urethane = lose-lose situation). A sealed/painted subfloor (to eliminate pet odour) underneath CARPET (stretched carpet) is a different kettle o'fish. Any other "floor" has issues being put down over top of the painted/urethaned subfloor. I've seen it dozens of times. Homeowners want a quick "pick me up" for their raw subfloors so they stain and urethane them. They live on the stained/finished OSB and then purchase flooring a few years down the line. That's when they find out they need to REMOVE or cover up the finished subfloor. Oops. That's another $2000 renovation cost they did NOT see coming! They find out that gluing down hardwood needs to go down over raw wood, not painted/urethaned wood. Or they find out they cannot tile over the finished subfloor. Or they cannot lay vinyl planks over the urethane/painted finish because the STAINING that WILL OCCUR (no one likes their white vinyl planked floor to turn ORANGE because the urethane below it BLED THROUGH to the surface....that's a REALLY upsetting event). You see where I'm going with this. Anyway....that's more along the lines of "please don't paint the wood" response I gave. There are very few positives to a painted subfloor - your situation is one of the ONLY positives. The rest leave the owner with a bigger mess than if they had just left it alone and thrown some carpet down "in the mean time".

Another vote for refinish. When I moved into my home, the previous owners had first done a 1980s pickling on the oak floors (except they did it in the 2000s), and then trashed the floors with I guess running a tractor over it? Jk, but I have no idea how they got the floors to be in such sad shape. Anyway, the floors looked so bad that I had a flooring guy in to talk about replacement. But he took out a small sander, and sanded a little square to show me how nice the natural red oak was underneath. So we sanded, put 3 coats of finish on it, and it looks really great. I left the finish natural because it shows no dirt or wear and goes with everything so I have no dilemmas about choosing upholstery, rugs and wall paint that will go with the floors. As mentioned earlier, what you get today is not going to be as nice as the older wood you currently have. Even if the wood is just 20 years old, it will be nicer than what is available now, and if it is older than that, it's even nicer. I have engineered wood in my ground floor den because it is a bit below-grade and local Code does not allow wood below grade. You can see the inferiority mostly because the real hardwood is just one floor up, but you can also feel it when you walk on it. Having said that, the engineered wood is fine, but if you have real wood already in your home, keep it and refinish it.