We have seen Paramount brand hardwood flooring at several local retailers, but I cannot find any reviews from customers. We are considering the Cortlandt Manor collection, specifically Sienna finished distressed hickory (product code E451). Any thoughts?

When it comes to "trends" vs. "timelessness" you want to look at your personal timeline for selling. Are you planning to sell in the next 5-7 years? If so, go with the trend and ignore your own tastes. If you sell in a few years then you are not buying/constructing the home for yourself. You are creating it for the NEXT buyer. If you are in it for the long haul (7+ years) then you put in the floor that makes YOU happy and that makes YOU smile and that makes YOU feel better about your choices. If you want flooring that can be "extended" into other areas for a later remodel (like in 10 years time) then work with the 3" product. It will be around for a long, long, long time. Wide planks are trending HEAVILY right now. They come and go. And if you are in there for 10+ years, you will want to have the option of refinishing so that when it comes time to sell, you can update your floors for $5/sf instead of having to pay someone to rip out and replace the floors ($10+ per square foot for a job like that).

Thanks all. We removed the floor. Unfortunately as expected, that exposed more of a mess. Luckily, no "damage" to subfloor per say, but it looked like the previous folks who installed the floor used leveling "float" on pretty much the entire 700 sqft and in some place as thick as almost 1.5 inches. This made it very difficult to remove the layers of flooring (combination of engineered hardwood glued down and some solid wood nailed down to plywood, which was glued and nailed down to "leveling float", which was poured over OSB subfloor). The demo guy tried to get to the OSB subfloor as best he could but he stopped after 2 days of demo and when the OSB was starting to get damaged as it came up with some of the float. We have now moved on to filling the 3 very low areas with some plywood and then pouring self leveling float over the entire floor to try to fill in all to "holes" that were created by trying to pull up the previous float. I guess I am officially welcomed to home ownership.

The new upstairs addition is a just big dormer in the shape of a rectangle that doesn’t span the entire length of the house and comes off the back. The entire upstairs has the sloped roof walls but in the area of the addition the ceiling is at normal height. The area was an attic crawl space and never had flooring. About 2/3 of the dormer is going to be a bathroom so it will be a different room and there will be a one inch step up through the door. But 1/3 of the new area that has no flooring (about 40 sq feet) will not be partitioned off from the rest of the bedroom with a door. The contractor thought about using that area as a closet but there is a window on the dormer at that location and we didn’t want to lose the natural light. So the little space will have three walls but be open to the room. We were thinking about making it into a little seating area with two chairs and a table for reading. I thought it might look ok to have carpet there if we can’t match the old pine wood.