Old Meets New Wood Floors | Picking the Perfect Stain

When we bought this house the floors were dark… and when I say dark, I mean REALLY DARK…and high gloss…and heavily scraped. It was not my style but they had never been sanded before so I thought we would try it out. We hadn’t moved in yet, so it was worth a shot since they were white oak floors. (Below is a pic of what they looked like when we first purchased this house.)

They sanded the floors a TON… but there were a few areas where the dark stain had embedded itself deep in the wood… since they were scraped floors. We just did a clear coat to try and keep the light color but even the water-based clear coat had a slight yellow hue, that no one else probably noticed but me. I knew that when we eventually renovated the kitchen, I wanted to find another solution.

When we started our kitchen renovation, I decided to do new flooring in the kitchen area. Because even after the floors in the kitchen were sanded, they were still in rough shape. There were lots of dark marks and no wood underneath the cabinets. I picked a white oak herringbone for the kitchen. I’ve always loved it and I thought it could provide a little visual separation for the rooms since the kitchen is open to the living area.

After laying the herringbone in the kitchen they patched up some of the dark marked boards in the living room and re-sanded it again. It helped a lot but I knew that finding the right stain combination was the key to getting the yellow hue out while still keeping the floors really light.

We started with natural stain, but it was actually darker than what I wanted. Then we did a 50% country white/50% natural stain mixture but the white somehow settled into the cracks and looked too “artificial”. Almost like white out in the cracks of the older floors. After mixing it a few other stain combos we found that the perfect combination was 25% country white with 75% natural.

The little bit of country white helped neutralize the yellow hue on our older white oak floors and the combo still looked great on the new floors. They now look like they were installed at the same time! Plus it saved us money not having to redo all the floors in the living area as well so win win!