Choosing a Stain for Our Hardwoods

Just a few days ago I shared our first official tour of house with the drywall up, read more about home tour here. Since sharing our tour, the drywall was been completely tapped and textured. In case your a new reader to my blog, we lost the majority of our belongings and house due to a fire in July 2012 you can read more about the fire here. We are now in the re-building stage and very grateful to rebuild our home. One thing I loved about our old walls was the texture, not rough not too smooth just right so we went that route again the finish is called imperfect smooth. It fits perfectly with our homes age. After the drywall was completed it was time to address our hardwood floors, just barely two years ago we refinished our floors DIY Style, read more about how we did our floors here. 

We were hopeful that could 'save' some of the original hardwoods seam in new hardwood floors in our house as needed. It was really important that our new unfinished hardwoods were the same size and type of wood, as or existing ones so everything would be consistent and seamless. The 'flooring guys', installed new unfinished matching hardwoods in our kitchen & dining room, portions of our living room, hallways and bedrooms. The flooring guys did an amazing job of matching our old hardwoods with our new hardwoods. 

Our new unfinished oak hardwoods came all the way from Kentucky, from a company called Lebanon Oak Flooring. The company has been in business since the late 1800's. I love that our flooring comes from a company that's been around for a really really long time and has a history, just like our original hardwood flooring. 

When we refinished our hardwood floors almost two years ago we with the Minwax color Early American. We were pretty certain would go use the same color stain again, until we started looking at the color swatches. 

This time around Hasani was really drawn to Dark Walnut, but I really liked Jacobean  The only way to truly know which color will look best on your floors, is to test the stain on your hardwoods, because the sample swatch might look completely different on your floors depending on your wood, age of type etc. If you follow me on Instagram then your spoiled and got a sneak peak at the stain colors we were considering. My user name on Instragram is Mrsclh...hope to see you on there! 

Dark Walnut: On our floors dark walnut was much lighter and had reddish brown undertones. In the sample swatch the color look more brown and showed less grain detail. 

Jacobean: Our on floors was a nice deep brown but not too dark and showed all the grain variations in our wood the showed a range of colors from light to dark. In the picture you can see how the stain isn't as dark on our hardwoods as it is on the swatch.

We looked at both colors side by side in natural light and full sunlight with the front door open & closed. We both agreed we loved how Jacobean looked, it showed all the pretty variations of the wood grain deeper and lighter in some areas. That's one the beauties of staining wood, seeing all the color variations and not getting one solid flat color. Yet the overall colors will look consistent. After selecting our stain color, the 'floor guys' came back the next day to apply the stain. I'll share more details of the staining process the floors professional use & our floors of course! 

What stain colors do you like on hardwoods, lighter or darker? What to you think of the stain we choose?