Q: We bought an older home and once we removed carpeting and linoleum discovered that the wood flooring underneath is made up of different kinds of wood. In our kitchen, which we are presently remodeling, the floor is Southern Yellow Pine. The dining room, living room and den are Red Oak. We would like to keep the existing flooring, but don’t want drastic color differences between the rooms. Since we are refinishing all the flooring, and have decided to only polyurethane the Red Oak, should we apply some kind of stain to the Yellow Pine to get a better match? If so, what color stain do you recommend? We also decided to use an oil-based polyurethane to get a darker, more amber tone to the floor over time. Thanks for any suggestions.
A: With some careful work you can coordinate the colors of your flooring, but it is impossible to truly match the two floors. With the natural pink tones found in Red Oak it will be very difficult to get a stain which will make the yellow pine coordinate with the natural tones of red oak. Also, keep in mind that the natural grain patterns of the yellow pine are very distinct and will stand out when compare to the red oak.
Your best bet to test out various stains and their effect on the wood will be to find boards in a closet area (or another area not likely to be seen by people), then test each stain on the wood and compare side by side with a piece of the red oak.
You may want to avoid an oil-based polyurethane as the amber tones it will cause could make coordinating a stain exceptionally difficult unless both the pine and oak were to be stained rather dark (such as a gunstock or walnut stain). If you are looking for an amber tone from the finish over the wood, you might want to avoid a stain and simply do some good transition work in order to transition from the pine to the oak.
The benefit here is that the pine is found only in the kitchen. With Yellow Pine’s grain pattern and yellow toned color, your kitchen can get a nice stand out appearance where the rest of the home will have the similar appearance from the red oak.
In the end here, if you truly wish to have all the coloring of the wood the same, and the vastly different grain patterns is not an issue for you, it will simply be a matter of testing various stains to find out which color will best suit you and the tone of the red oak in your home. This will depend on how old the pine is in your home (very old yellow pine has a very distinct look as it’s grain pattern darkens over time) and it could be nearly impossible to stain it in a way that would coordinate with Red Oak.
