Hardwood floors WWYD

[picksthemusic]

My house issues lately have been a real saga.

We are getting our ensuite bathroom redone due to a drain leak from our shower, and that job is about 90% done (and it's only taken over a year! LOLSOB). While waiting for those things to get done, last Monday our downstairs powder room toilet overflowed due to a sewer line blockage, and got into our hardwoods in the powder room, the hallway, the hall closet, the laundry room, and the drywall. We are now living with plastic zippered walls and a dehumidifier running 24/7, plus the almost done work upstairs and plastic on our stairs and carpet in our bedroom. We look like we're living in a hoarding situation and it's driving us a little bonkers, to say the least.

This means insurance is paying to have our hardwoods refinished, a new powder room, and possibly a new laundry room floor and paint, at least. Silver linings. I've loathed my powder room for a LONG time.

With the hardwoods, we live in a home built in 1997, and it has the gold/yellow oak finish on all the wood that isn't white trim. We have gray walls of varying colors which we are still happy with, at least. The kitchen cabinets are the same yellow/gold oak. We do not like this color, and would like to change it somehow, but it's not in the budget to redo our kitchen cabinets right now (either professionally or on our own). The guy doing the remediation work knows the guy they contract with to do the refinishing of the hardwoods, and he mentioned that if they mess up anything on the cabinets while redoing the floors, that they have to replace all the cabinets too (on the insurance dime). He said it doesn't always happen, but it does sometimes. We know we can't plan on this happening, obviously. But one can hope!

So, planning for everything to go smoothly, do we change the stain color of the hardwoods to something we love, or keep it the same color to match what we already have? Has anyone had to have this done in their home before, and what did you all do? We already spent a lot of our own money redoing the bathroom upstairs since it was being halfway done by insurance anyway, so that's what depleted a lot of our funds.

I'd love any opinions or stories you all have.

[deadwing]

Oh, god, that's a tough position. My house has those yellow/golden floors and I hate them. I have the advantage of my kitchen cabinets being a very different color from the floors (hardwoods in my kitchen as well). I think I would try to pick a new color that I would be happy with and wouldn't swear at the kitchen cabinets, if such a color exists.

FWIW, my last house's hardwoods were stained the Early American color of Minwax and I truly loved the color. I'd be inclined to pick that color when I someday refinish the hardwoods here. It's not too dark, but it's dark enough.

[atarianna]

I would absolutely change the floor color to something you like better 100%. The cabinets can be something you tackle later, but why do the floors twice; now and later, you know?

One thing to consider too, asking how much money it would add for the contractor who is already doing the work to add on painting the cabinets to the original job. This would ultimately save you a lot since they are already on the job, and would just need to add in labor and limited supplies (versus setup charges etc).

[Ashley&Scott]

Pick the floor color you love, regardless of the color of the cabinets. Update/replace the cabinets & other golden oak woodwork in the future when your budget allows.

[gummybear]

Change the floors. No sense in living with something you dislike.

[simpsongal]

I'd pick a stain color you like - be sure to see samples in your space. We just did our red oak floors and went with Minwax Special Walnut. It was a nice mid tone brown (classic, never goes out of style).

Once you get through these projects I bet you'll either feel motivated to paint the cabinets or redo the kitchen.

[kitty]

I would definitely pick something you like better and there will probably be some neutral options that won't openly conflict with the cabinets. If you were hoping for HGTV style gray wood floors, that might be tough with golden oak cabinets but I would definitely stick to something more classic and keep the trendier stuff on more easily changeable finishes.

[TR]

Mar 25, 2024 13:45:40 GMT -5 atarianna said:

I would absolutely change the floor color to something you like better 100%. The cabinets can be something you tackle later, but why do the floors twice; now and later, you know?

One thing to consider too, asking how much money it would add for the contractor who is already doing the work to add on painting the cabinets to the original job. This would ultimately save you a lot since they are already on the job, and would just need to add in labor and limited supplies (versus setup charges etc).

I really thought this was going to go on to say "...to 'accidentally' fuck up the cabinets" lol

[circa1978]

1) I feel your pain because we had a flood in our kitchen in July 2020 and it took well more than a year to get it done, with about six months of us living with nothing but subfloor on about 800 square feet of our house (kitchen, breakfast room, laundry room, rear entrance and sunroom.) I would pick a stain you like for the floors and plan to paint the cabinets. It's not like you can paint the floor, lol! Also, FWIW, although we do have wood in our laundry room, and hopefully your water issues are at an end, I think it's acceptable to have tile in those areas even when everything else is wood given the water sources there. Just something to think about.

[UMaineTeach]

Go with the floors you like.

You don’t want to re-do the floors again when you redo the cabinets.

It can look mismatched for a while.

[livinitup]

I agree to change the floors to what you want now (while not being too trendy). You can either leave the cabinets or paint them or hope they get damaged and replaced by insurance.

From what I’ve heard, painting cabinets is not the hard part - having them professionally re-hung is the expense. And you have to have them professionally re-hung.

[definitelyO]

We redid our kitchen and our floors. while we changed to white cabinets our house has a lot of knotty pine - yellow wood. We stained the floors American Walnut (I can verify the name when I get home) and love it.
in this picture the doors and the trim are all the yellow-ish and the floors are newly redone.  (sorry it's huge)

[Stan]

DH is a claims adjuster. If the contractor messes up your cabinets, they will fix it on their dime, not your HO policy just FYSA.

[tacocat]

I just want to jump in to say that they may not replace all of them, they will pay to “match”. This happened to us during our large water leak in our kitchen where they tried to do the same. The company (local to us if you are who I remember lol) was waaaayyy cheaper than I expected and they were supposedly able to match our old overly detailed similar to your color cabinets.

We opted to pay to replace as it would drive me nuts to have something close but not exact and it was still cheaper than if we did the whole thing, but not free at all ha. I can send you the cabinet company if you like grey as they are also local lol.

[tacocat]

Also I want to say sorry. It is such a pain to do this with insurance, we are 8 months in and not done either!

[frlcb]

Change the floors. You will kick yourself down the road if you don’t.

Also, sympathy. We had a toilet flood in December and are dealing with that now, and 3 weeks ago my parents, who live on my street, had a sewer line backup into their house and had caused $500k worth of damage to their 2 year old house. Highly recommend getting a backflow valve for it into your clean out if you have one. It will push sewage away from your house if a blockage happens from the street (which is what happened to my parents). We had one put in last week.

[sadlebred]

Change the floors. It's less money down the road.

Not the same, but 2 years ago I had a plumbing leak that resulted in damage in the den and laundry room. Insurance was going to pay for the crappy carpet with more crappy carpet. Then the remediation company broke some tile in the power room when taking up the carpet. I replaced everything with LVP that I purchased myself not through insurance. I paid the contractor to install it in the laundry room. The remediation company covered the LVP & labor for installing it in the bath. Insurance covered labor to install it in the den. Sort of convoluted....but I wouldn't trade the LVP for all the crappy carpet in the world! I love my floors!

[luckystar2]

We have the same color floors. We also had same color cabinets. We had the opposite issue. We redid our kitchen but weren’t ready to redo the floors. We didn’t want to go with that same color but also didn’t want anything that didn’t really match. The place we ordered cabinets from said if we wanted different but that would compliment to look at the floor grain and pick out something that is close to a dark color in the floor wood. So that’s what we did. Our cabinets are a darker brown but they still compliment the floors and don’t look super out of place. I never hated the wood color of our floor like some people do but having the floor and cabinets all the same was a bit much. I like the contrast now and makes the floors a little better.

[picksthemusic]

Mar 25, 2024 20:06:00 GMT -5 tacocat said:

I just want to jump in to say that they may not replace all of them, they will pay to “match”. This happened to us during our large water leak in our kitchen where they tried to do the same. The company (local to us if you are who I remember lol) was waaaayyy cheaper than I expected and they were supposedly able to match our old overly detailed similar to your color cabinets.

We opted to pay to replace as it would drive me nuts to have something close but not exact and it was still cheaper than if we did the whole thing, but not free at all ha. I can send you the cabinet company if you like grey as they are also local lol.

Are you in Seattle-ish? I forgot, haha. If so, yes, we'd love the name! We love who we went with for our bathroom vanity cabinets, but they are $$$ (even though they do amazing work and are so, SO nice). If it comes down to it, we may just have them painted and get new doors for the cabinets. I'm leaning towards white since our countertops are a dark blue granite (looks kinda like Starry Night so I like it). Thanks for the advice!

[picksthemusic]

Mar 26, 2024 9:23:55 GMT -5 luckystar2 said:

We have the same color floors. We also had same color cabinets. We had the opposite issue. We redid our kitchen but weren’t ready to redo the floors. We didn’t want to go with that same color but also didn’t want anything that didn’t really match. The place we ordered cabinets from said if we wanted different but that would compliment to look at the floor grain and pick out something that is close to a dark color in the floor wood. So that’s what we did. Our cabinets are a darker brown but they still compliment the floors and don’t look super out of place. I never hated the wood color of our floor like some people do but having the floor and cabinets all the same was a bit much. I like the contrast now and makes the floors a little better.

This is what my brother (a high-ranking architect for an international firm) is saying as well - 'complimenting' wood colors. Which I totally agree with; we will pick the color we want for the floors for sure.

I love the color that simpsongal suggested - so pretty! I think once we're done with the remediation part of it and can focus on the restoration part, I'll be in a better place.

Right now we're also dealing with the fact that our upstairs toilet installation caused some water leakage into our downstairs ceiling and now that's all cut out to air dry so we can't use our family room with the TV until it's repaired. I have to laugh, or I will cry.

Luckily, the fans they were using to dry everything out are finally gone (it was SO loud yesterday!), so we can at least have a bit of peace.

[AAM2012]

I would change the floors to tile that looks like wood versus hardwood, even if it means paying out of pocket for the difference.