id pick a much harder wood than pine.

my floors are 160 years old. my dogs have aged them more in the past 6 years that we have lived here than in the 154 years before that.

Where is this project?

What do want the floor to look like we do hand distressed finishes.

We travel and do work out of state. We would need your specs and amount of floor to be installed.

Distressed can be done by any specialty wood flooring firm. I would start with the NWFA Certified Installer list. Contact anyone on the list to have them come out and offer a quote. These finishes can double the final price of the install. I've seen some site finished hand scraped hardwoods with a labor cost of $15-$20/sf. The wood is extra.

Distressing a wood floor is hard, expensive, time consuming labor. If you want to save your budget, you can have a lower gloss finish applied and allow the dogs free reign. After about 7 years, the deep nail grooves, etc will be set. Then go ahead and have the floors sanded and refinished once more = 'distressed look' with half the price tag of "site finished distressed".

Voila...distressed on a budget. And I'm not kidding about the price of labor. It can be sky high when doing it on-site. Good luck. Either way you cut it, these floors will look well loved.

Post pics when it's in!

Excellent. Now you will want to have pin-point accurate humidity control. Bamboo is SUPER picky about its living conditions. It likes to sit between 40% - 50% humidity. This is one of the narrowest "happy zones" in the flooring industry. It must be tightly controlled (finger tip control on your humidistat that is attached to your HVAC system). If you do not have humidity control, you will want to have an HVAC professional come in and tell you the cost of this upgrade.

It is cheaper to upgrade the HVAC BEFORE the floors are installed rather than have to replace all the flooring AND THEN add to the HVAC. That's the really expensive way to go.

Cancork

i am just interested do you floors other than cork?

Not really, no. We have a fusion hybrid floor that is 90% cork floating floor with a super tough surface of polypropylene. Because cork only makes up 1% of the world's floor coverings, I have to know a HUGE amount about everyone else's products...like bamboo, hardwood, laminate, vinyl, etc.

Cork competes directly with all of them (including carpet) so I have to know what is "up" with everyone else's product.