Vinogirl, Heart Pine. I'm torn here because I've gone to houses and seen it finished on-site. I've also seen UA's Pine as well as Crescent Hardwood's Pine in the natural and Amber (darker) finish. Stunning. I know it will be slightly softer than oak but that's part of the character of heart pine. And heart pine is harder than regular pine. But it's not cheap. They do have engineered with relatively no sheen. Both the UA and Crescent Hardwood were 7" planks. I've gone to a fantastic local flooring place with my photos. The guy that's helping me pulled out the heart pine engineered as well as a beautiful brazilian walnut floor that was a bit less and much much harder. The third choice I liked that he pulled for me was Mannington Marrakech Hickory in a med/deep stain. My goal is to have a floor with character but something that won't overpower the space and that helps the space feel comfortable. I was happy with these three over everything I saw. Then I saw the site finished reclaimed heart pine and my heart stopped a little. If we only had unlimited funds!!

There's a ton of variety when it comes to engineered vs. real hardwood floors. Engineered is just as great in my opinion...obviously they are very different products. Here's a great site to check out just in case you're still toying around with the idea. I know there are a lot of posts here... you may have finished your project already!! Here's the info though, hope this helps. Its a flooring site and its all informational. It's very helpful for anyone installing new floors, cleaning, fixing, blogging about their experiences and ideas... some comments are super funny! anyway, hope this helps! Here is a link that might be useful: Flooring Information

I've dealt with 30 year old engineered floors with the original finish, and a couple of screening and topcoating over it. If you take care of floors and don't let kids play roller hockey indoors, you too will never need to do a sand and refinish. The idea of "refinishing" as a criteria for choosing your floors is not really a valid concern. Choose a quality major brand, and you won't have any worries. No LL or box store crapola. $5-6 a square foot and up is where the good stuff starts. Under that, you can get some OK buys, but you're generally gonna have to do a lot more homework to make sure. So, what does "taking care of your floors" entail? Vacuuming a couple of times a week. Not allowing food and drink outside of the kitchen. Using rugs at all entries to capture the dirt from outside. Being a no shoes indoor household helps a lot too, but I'm not going to get into that classic arguement. Don't mop your floors. You can damp clean them, but people get all hung up over sloshing water on top of wood, and that's just a comple no no. Use something like a Bona cleaner a couple of times a month, max. Every other type of cleaning should be spot cleaning. But with food and drink confined to the appropriate spot, spills are minimized. Abrasion from debris is minimized by rugs that you frequently clean. And in 8-12 years, you do a refresher of a screening and recoating. You don't need to sand down to bare wood at all. Unless you don't do the above and wear through to bare wood.

This looks less than 1/2". I've seen 3/8" engineered hardwood at some of the low-end big-box stores so I know it is out there. The wear layer is also know as the "veneer". They are one and the same. The thickness shown here is probably 2mm. For a thin engineered hardwood, a 2mm thick wear layer = completely normal. The 'white' appearance to the scratches has TWO reasons behind it: 1. The colour. The darker the colour the MORE you will see the scratch because it has a strong CONTRAST to the colour below (white shows up nicely on dark brown). 2. The FINISH. I would say that 95-99% of all "entry level" engineered hardwoods come with Aluminium Oxide (AO) as the finish. This is a SUPER tough finish. And to be clear, "tough" has very little to do with scratches. Scratches happen. They are supposed to happen. It is what tells you the finish is doing it's job = protect the raw wood underneath. The "tough" means it doesn't wear THROUGH or wear OFF. Scratch = yes. Wear THROUGH/off = no. The AO finish has a long history of turning WHITE when it scratches. This is a little different from traditional polyurethane/urethane finishes. They too will scratch but the colour is rarely WHITE....it is more often a skin tone = doesn't show up so well on wood. So....when you add AO finish to a darker wood (or midtone such as yours) you run the risk of SEEING the blistering white scratches - scratches that are going to be there no matter what. As for "finish coming off of the spare planks" this is EXTREMELY rare! This is where you have a HUGE piece of leverage. Do you have photos? I would LOVE to see them.