Hi Gardengirl, Here in the mojave desert, traditional 3 coat stucco is very common on most all homes here. Where we are building in the sierra nevadas,(at 4500'), it is now being used with the use of the acrylic top coat i have been mentioning to you. The acrylic is what deals with the expansion/contraction caused by temperature differences, wet/cold freezing in the winter, dry hot with varying humitidy levels, then cooling way down at night in the summer. A traditional top coat when exposed to wet winter freezing has a tendency to crack because of it's rigidity not being flexible like the acrylic. The mojave has some wet winter and freezing days as well, but the days of freezing temps are typically short unlike the sierras where the exteriors are exposed to freezing temps greater lengths of time. I cant speak for the wood substrate expanding/contracting unless it is getting moisture, that's why the underlayment install as well as flashings/drainage planes are so critical in order to keep it dry. There is movement due to settling in homes most anywhere. Up in the sierras, some older late 1800's homes and town buildings were the old cementious based hard coat with the top coat being paint. These buildings have cracks, but are in surprisingly good shape for their age. Paint is a flexible coating as well, that's why the acrylic is being used as it has even greater flexibility. I would ask your contractor to look into the acrylic top coat as a traditional top coat wont hold up in the midwest winters and as you stated, will cause severe cracking that can cause the underlayment to fail and lead to moisture damage if the cracks aren't repeatedly attended to. The acrlyic can be textured in any pattern the same as traditional. You can have a heavy mediteranean that you are looking for, old world, knock downs, or smooth with or without sand finishing. Many texture choices are available if the installer has that experience, which most stucco crews have these days. We have an old world finish on our build with a sand mixed in the acrylic. If your contractor isn't familiar with acrylic, i can possibly get some info for you from our stucco contractor about the products and possible availibility in your area. The difference between the acrylic and traditional concerning the install,is that both are troweld on, but with acrylic, a brush and roller technique is used as well as it is almost paint like and comes in 5 gallon buckets rather than the powdered mix of traditional mixed with water and typically put on with a sponge trowel and textured by way of a hard trowel.

My previous home (1930's) had oak floors (the old kind, yellowish orange) through out (including bathrooms) apart from the kitchen that had douglas fur. We thought the flow from oak to pine was fine. My new home, also wood trough out has 4 different kids of wood. Kitchen is yellow hard wood pine, pantries are douglas fur, dinning room and all the rest of first floor is oak. Upstairs hallway is oak, half bedrooms are birch and half bedrooms are douglas fur. The only one that I am not thrilled with is the the birch which I think it looks weird. Anyway, my point is that although so many different woods are used somehow everything looks nice. People always comment on the richness of my floors. I think nothing can go wrong with using 2 different kids of wood as long as the color hue is not completely off. I would not get something too white or something that looks too exotic unless of course you want to create a complete different feel. The only thing I would worry is the contrast between the old and the new. One of my closets of my new home was completely rotten (from roof leaking...) and we put there a brand new floor. While we matched the wood and color still anytime I look in there it looks so new that is an eyesore. Thankfully it is just a closet. I think our mistake was to buy the kind that wad the poly already applied so it is not the same poly that the rest of the room has. If I had to do it over I would get the unfinished wood. And ask my kids to distress it a lit bit...:)

You can also verrrrry carefully pry off a piece of molding (say, a bit of baseboard in a corner behind a door) and take it to a specialty lumberyard or woodworkers' supply store like Woodcraft. If you can take up a bit of wood flooring from a closet or under a threshold that would be ideal as well. The people who work in those places tend to be more knowledgeable by far about identifying wood. Other woods used for millwork and flooring in that period and style include Douglas fir, chestnut, elm, walnut, cherry, and other fruit/nut-woods, mahogany, gumwood (eucalyptus), redwood, pretty much you name it... it all depends on the original builder's tastes and budget, and what was readily available locally (unless someone wealthy wanted to show off with exotic woods). To complicate the issue: it's also very common for the public areas of the house - living and dining rooms, front hallways, foyers, etc. - to have the "extra fancy" wood for mouldings and flooring and the private areas such as kitchens, bedrooms, and upstairs hallways to have completely different, cheaper materials, although the "cheap" wood of 100 years ago is still miles better than a lot of the expensive stuff on the market today! (Which is why it's such a sin to rip it out willy-nilly and chuck it in a dumpster.) We know this is the case with our ca.1900 house; although we have not begun stripping the trim in earnest enough has chipped off all on its own for us to know that the downstairs trim is a tight-grained hardwood that had started its life with a very dark finish, while the upstairs trim is pine or spruce that had originally been painted a rather gruesome minty-yellowish green, almost more like an opaque stain. And to even further complicate the issue, in that period labor tended to be fairly cheap due to widespread immigration of European craftsmen and the materials were dear, and there was a good bit of "faux bois" grain-painting going on (yes, even in A&C houses)! So something that once stripped turns out to be pine might not have originally appeared to be pine, it might have looked like a much more expensive wood like mahogany or gumwood...

Hi, I would use gel stains for this. I'd start with a "new pine" color, very light but pigmented. Then layer on the color of your choice until it was dark enough. The first stain will seal the grain so every subsequent coat colors the entire piece the same without the softer wood taking in the majority of the color. Instead of the new pine color, you could use clear "sealcoat" (de-waxed) shellac. That would likely give a clearer grain effect even under a few coats of gel stain, but not do as good a job stopping the natural orange tone of fir. BTW, oil gel stain, not acrylic latex. If your drying conditions are less than ideal, you can intersperse more coats of shellac; rub out with synthetic steel wool before the next layer of color. Topcoat could be whatever you wish, but the clear satin gel varnish looks great if you can keep up with it. It dries very fast in warm weather. Casey