"Recently walked through a rental house that had carpet atop a wood subfloor and it had kind of an icky hollow flimsy sound. Which made me wonder ... if you like that solid old-school-floor feel ... do you really need to go with thicker wood, like 3/4"? ..." You probably walked on a plywood floor covered with carpet. Putting 3/4 inch hardwoods down over plywood normally results in a very solid feeling floor (though not as stiff as concrete). It helps if the floor strips are perpendicular to the joists (but not reuired of the plywood is thick enough). The old farts who used diagonal plank sub floors new the hardwood strips could then go either way.

How'd the floor get wet? As for Mannington blowing you off...some manufacturer reps will do that and it makes no sense from a customer relations stand point. If the adjuster is coming out soon, leave it alone. Can the floor be matched? Better ask Mannington, but my answer would be no. If half the floor is damaged, that's a total loss in my book.

First off, remove the rug (it looks like an area rug) and allow the floor full exposure to "air". Secondly, bring in some BIG (industrial) fans. Get some SERIOUS ventilation over these floors. Do so AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! Because you caught this quickly you can QUICKLY save these floors. You need to DRY THEM OUT. And do it now. Find commercial rental products such as industrial fans/ventilators and get them in there ASAP. Let them run, and run, and run, and run. You will leave them on (24/7) until the wood is COMPLETELY dry. This could be a week or so. Don't skimp on the electricity bill. Let the fans run. It is cheaper to pay another $100 in electricity than it is to rip-out/replace a house full of wood. Good luck. You've caught this quickly. You can quickly get your floors back in order by getting the industrial fans on them.

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.