This is a hickory engineered hardwood that I love the color and look online. But like you say you can't judge online - I just know I want more a brown rather than a golden oak or reddish stain. Anyway this is my dream floor color here. I'm now wondering if the Duraseal medium brown would be good but it's almost as dark as Jacobean. By the way we stained the floor in our previous home Jacobean and I loved it. I might have to over-rule my hubby. :-)

Lol -- get out of my brain! We had a hickory engineered hardwood floor very much like that in our previous home (see pic) and I loved it too. This was our previous home:

New floor · More Info

But I hope you're just leaning toward mid-brown rather than attempting to get too close to the pic you posted, since it features hickory vs. red oak, it's wide plank, it's hand-scraped, etc. Now, both of us are dealing with a very different beast.

No matter what color stain you choose, it's going to have a red cast unless you go very dark or take extra measures to reduce the red. There's a two-step product called Bona Red Out that can be applied to the raw wood after sanding, and it will neutralize a lot of the red and pink. You can also select a stain that has some green in it, since green is red's opposite on the color wheel. Since you like Jacobean, you could try mixing it with Duraseal Silvered Gray (a light color), and with Rustic Beige (a little darker), and with Provincial (darker, but still with a cool/ashy undertone).

You need to get real life samples of the stain on your floor and I would want to make sure you can get this floor when you finally redo the kitchen becuase I bet that will be in the future and you will want all the floors to match. I do not usually like doing major changes before living in the space but the floors are hard to do after move in The info above is very helpful and I always prefer a very dark stain on red oak to eliminate the red as much as possible.

Thanks Particia - very helpful. I don't think what we're doing in the kitchen should impact the floor - hopefully not. We do want to do the floors before moving in for sure. The advice of using a dark stain on red oak is good to know. My floor guy keeps warning about darker floors being harder to keep clean. I guess he means it shows dust? That doesn't really make sense to me since I had dark hardwood floors in our last home and it was not at all hard to keep clean. We don't have pets - also we take off shoes in the house (for the most part). Anyway - thanks so much for weighing in.

Thoughts on this stain? It seems a tad gray which might counteract the inherent redness of red oak? I think this iwll be one of the ones I'll try out. Has anyone used this stain color on red oak? This is Duraseal "Aged Barrel".

I am testing that color now and it went white red.