Wood Floor Color Issue

Speckert · 07-30-2011, 03:15 AM

I put solid red oak floors in my dining room a year ago. Installed, stained (english chestnut) and clear coated. Love the red hues in the flooring. Really liked them so decided to add on to them and continue them into the living room and down the hallway and replace the carpeted steps with red oak treads and risers. The problem is the floor in the dining room has a redder tone to it than the newer installed floors. Did I screw up by not stripping the floors in the dining room back down to bare wood and staining the whole project at the same time or am I going to have these differences because of different wood lots? How do I correct this or make it less noticeable. Will sanding the entire project down to bare wood and restaining it with a little darker color (I like the darker floors) make the color more consistant?
Any advice is greatly appreciated. I am willing to go back to bare wood and start over but I just hope there is no need to tear it all back out and start over. That would hurt the pocket book a lot.

**oh'mike** · 07-30-2011, 08:38 AM

It's almost impossible to to get a perfect color match with older work and new----the wood darkens and gets a patina within a year--so the older work will have a color tone that is darker and more complex than the new work.

If the tone change is unacceptable---then sanding the whole floor and restaining will be required.

Waiting for the new work to 'mellow' might be the ticket.also.

Bud Cline · 07-30-2011, 01:55 PM

...there is no guarantee that last years wood and this years wood are the same thing exactly. In fact, you could almost be guaranteed they are not.