This morning I received an interesting call from a nice homeowner in California.
Unfortunately, she is having some problems with new and old floors. It seems that she had some pickled oak floors in some areas of the home and was adding new hardwood to match and then refinish all the areas so that thye matched. She interviewed several contractors and asked them about replacing some sections and starting from scratch vs. adding new and blending it in. They opted for blending in, and I will say that on the surface, this probably was probably the right thing to do, and probably what I would have advised as well.
However, her floors do not match.
Now, bear in mind, that I have not seen her floors, so all this info below is speculative based on her descriptions and I'm counseling her as I'm driving (to Starbucks, of course LOL)
The most likely reason for the mismatch is that they have 2 different species in there - red oak and white oak. She stumbled across one of my blog posts on TheFlooringGirl.com Red oak vs white oak - What's the Difference? She said it was the first thing she came across that made any sense to her and was written in clear English. So, she gave The Flooring Girl a call, and I did my best to try to help.
I told her the 2nd most likely issue is that there are different grades of oak - select grade vs. No 1 vs. No 2, so it's possible that even if they got the species right, the wood could look different pending on mixing the grades. And, it's possible she has both issues. I referred her to the National wood floor Assocation on this since I have not yet written a blog on this topic (coming soon LOL). But, I do know that there site has some pictures which would help her.
It is also possible that part of the issue may also be that her old floors which were pickled could have been damaged during the pickling process. Sometimes, they use bleach to do this, so it is possible that this is causing part of the issue. Also, the other floor is older..but it's only 20 yrs old, and the issues of age tend to show up more with old pine than with oak. (In Westchester, we have many older homes that are over 100 yrs old...so if there is pine and it's aged for over 100 yrs, that's much more challenging to match.
I then tried to provide some suggestions of what she might be able to do...short of ripping up and replacing the floor (which I think both parties want to try to avoid (oh, and by the way, she is staying in hotel while this work is going on, and her hotel bill is adding up every day that goes by). So, I suggested that they try some tints on the next coat of polyurethane to see if that would help make them more even. I also noted that she could try a darker stain...the darker you go, the less you will notice the color variation. I also pointed her to my blog post on water based vs. oil based polyurethane - which is better for refinishing hardwood floors? They were using water based polyurethane which not only won't last as long, but most likely the oil based poly will help blend the floors better and bring out the color better. I also told her about the Minwax stain colors that she could find on line and which colors are most in style.
I advised her to have them test several different options before proceeding as well as have them try to identify the type of woods used..once they know that, it will help them problem solve better - whichever solution they use - either replace/redo, refinish or tint.
I really do hope things work out for her, and I realized afterwards that I don't have her contact info to follow up (she called from a Private Number). I think it's really cool to think about what a wide impact we can have on the web. Oh, and, as it turns out, she knows an architect in my county, so you never know.
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