I've done jobs with different oil products but used the Rubio only twice. One turned out perfect. It was a mix of White and Pure on rift sawn White Oak. The owner insisted on using a green finish with no solvents and I warned her it was fine except for potential issues with dog accidents. You can probably guess what happened. The second was Super White that we water popped. It ended up with some cloudy areas which points out issues with finishing technique. The floor needs to be sanded perfectly and scrupulously cleaned before oil application, and the finish needs to be removed completely or it will be cloudy. I just finished a natural color job with WOCA. It turned out nice in the end but took a bit of work. We washed the freshly sanded floor with the Wood Cleaner. The effect of the water made the floor look less smooth than desired. We tried extra coats, abraded with an abrasive nylon pad then re-oiled to the same end. Then we re-screened the floor, applied two more coats and it looks great. I think I'd forgo the cleaning step in the future. I like the idea of the Rubio and even have enough material in stock to do my own floor however I like the ease of maintenance and relative simplicity of the WOCA product line. The Rubio Soap is crazy expensive IMO. Coloring my opinion is that my local Rubio distributor is somewhat pathetic. I found a distributor in GA that carries WOCA and Rubio so that will at least put that issue to rest and give me a resource with expertise to draw on. I like the Rubio Smoke, Fumed and Precolor products for the breadth of unique looks it can achieve when used with their products. The bad? It requires more routine maintenance than poly. It's more susceptible to minor spills and stains. You are unlikely to find maintenance product for sale locally, so stock up. I have two older parquet floors in a wood that's no longer available. I plan on sanding it, wire brushing it, then applying a mix of White and Super White with the idea that the floor will go from it's current dark mahogany look, to a coffee with cream color with white in the deeper grain. I don't know that I'd use it in my own kitchen even though I can pay my own workers to change it fairly effortlessly. I am something of a skeptic when reading the claims of the wonders of the new generation of oil finishes, even though I'd like them to be true.

We had our 2 1/2" top-nailed red oak floors refinished with some kind of water-based Bona Natural seal...no stain...almost 2 years ago. The nails are visible in the existing floor, which were sanded enough to remove the stain; nails are not as visible on the matching floor we had them install in the rooms that had previously been carpet. I thought the nail visibility had more to do with how much floor was sanded down to remove the pre-existing stain. Nothing is rusty.

Did you ever have any luck with the banister? i have white oak, red oak, and fir in my house trying to make it all match or complement the look of natural white oak! If you found something that worked can you please share an after photo and the color used? thanks!

See my similar (but far less costly) experience with this post: Ever bought white oak, but got red? And the pink part was not a trick of the eye, but literally a staining of the treatment that I could scrape off with my fingernail. I have had this happen with antique doors I am refinishing as well... As you can see by some of the professionals' answers, there is no specific "white oak" tree, nor "red oak" tree, but rather a bunch of different species that get slotted into the two separate boxes and a few in between. (For example, we started a green leaf maple and red leaf maple in the same pot; they grafted onto each other before we planted in yard, and the resulting, single tree is somewhere in between...plenty of trees in a forest can do something similar. ) Plus, what we've Iearned is that in some mills, the decisions to figure out what's what once logs arrive to be planed is often done by "looking at them." The only way you can know for sure is to send a sample scraping of several of the boards to NWFA or university botany department to have it tested to see if what you have fits neatly into one or the other category... To the other poster, If it ended up grey after being refinished, this could be a purple hue of the red and white of the wood's tannins mixed with blue-ish undertone that is used to make white "cool." White is not free of other colors, and "natural" sealers have a tiny bit of white in them...