Hello, I have a 5" plank prefinished white oak from the Garrison collection. We had it installed in our dining room, kitchen, nook and family room last Sept. I just love it! Will probably do 2 bedrooms in it this summer. Most of my house is oak except my new kitchen is Cherrywood (not real red) and the floor goes well with it also. I bought the flooring off of eBay for $3.42 sf + tax and delivery. My installer said he could get it for the same and less on the delivery charge. I think Garrison is connected with Old Master. Here is a picture of it against my Cherry cabinets.

Now even more to add to the dilemma...minor I'm sure in perspective to true dilemmas..... I just found a website that makes wide plank flooring and spoke with a "professional" about my flooring choices..their products are $8-$26 per sq. foot but she says that they use 120 year old trees and cut their planks from the heart of them not the canopy and outer edge that many of these manufacturers selling red oak for $2 per sq. foot...so now I'm wondering... We hope this is our last house and we'd like to do it right...is it really a much better wood if it's from the heart and an old tree? I'm considering white oak or heart pine...she's telling me to do staggered sizes 5-10"...she said because they're a finer product they are less likely to cup and I would need to acclimate it first, this house is 8 years old and I planned on bringing them inside for a couple of weeks. This company also says they need no sanding and to put 4 coats of tung oil on them and that's it. So, do I go with a prefinished 3.25? Do I go with the $2 per sq. foot red oak, stain it and sand and finish Do I go with the wider plank flooring (oak or pine) install it ourselves and tung oil it ourselves? Which flooring would give me the longest wear factor and be less prone to cupping? If I have a slight dip in part of the area I'm flooring, can I just shimmy it with underfelt? Too many questions I know, just wanted to lay it all out there and see if any of you have run into these issues before and what your experiences have been. Thanks! Tara

Yes, I believe they are a fad, and I'll tell you why. They're virtually impossible to screen and recoat. That's basic maintainence every 5-10 years. You bring in a heavy duty buffer and "rough up" the floors and then reapply a finish coat. With hand scraped, you have to do all of the screening by hand if you're going to get "down in the hollows" as well as hit the high points. That's a lot more maintainence intensive, as well as expensive. If you don't do the screen and recoat, and now you have to refinish, then you have to machine sand, although I suppose you could pay exhorbitantly for someone to hand sand the whole floor. Sanding will take off the high spots and even the flooring out. That hand scraped look will be gone. They'll be flat and smooth--which was the goal of most of our forefathers who put in wood floors. Rustic plank floors weren't meant for upscale homes. THose were workman's homes. They were just waxed cheap pine boards that if they were lucky got stripped and rewaxed every couple of years. Nice wood floors in more upscale homes, such as oak or mahogany, were sanded smooth, shellaced, and waxed, and kept buffed to a high shine by paid help. It's a peculiar reversal of status to have hand scraped and rustic floors now rather than smooth high shine ones. It's much like during the old days when pale skin was considered beautiful and desirable by the elite and if you had a tan, that mean that you had to work outside and thus were of a lower social status. Then that reversed, and the social elite were the only ones who had the leisure and money to travel to exotic locations to acquire a tan, and the pale folks were the ones in the factories out of the sun.

As JLC said, you have nicely finished doorways ... the only time you will see both floors is when you have a door open. And with the difference in lighting, you won't notice slight differences. Here's how I match or blend finishes: Bring home some samples of the prefinished you are thinking about and lay them in the hallway, parallel to the existing floors. Stand back 10 or so feet and pick the board or boards that you have the hardest time spotting. That's your match. Or, remove the boards that stand out ... what's left is the matching color. If you carefully pick the ONE board that is just inside the doorway to be as close a match to the older one in the hall it will make the blend almost invisible. Here, in an 1880s adobe ... the door stops where the pale wood is, and I picked new boards with the brownish tones of the old floor (upper part) to make the new flooring (running side to side) less conspicuous. (there was craptastical 1990s carpet and some wierd sill arrangement to deal with ... nothing in the house is square, plumb, or level). By matching size and rustic-ness in the new flooring we got a floor that blends with the old. Cleaning and refinishing the old floor (eventually) will make oit blend better.