Do my wood floors need to match?

6 years ago

Our house has the wood floors in the third picture throughout on the first floor. We are taking the carpet off the stairs and second floor and installing laminate floors.

My wife and I don’t necessarily love what’s on the first floor and the contractor isn’t able to find a perfect match in our price range (like the match is way out of our budget). He said the existing color is very difficult to match

The fourth picture shows our existing floor (including the long piece used for comparison) with the samples the contractor brought by. My wife and I like the second one and think it’s “close enough”.

Do the floors need to match as close as possible? Should we do something totally different that would compliment? Should we find something we love, even if it doesn’t match, and install it throughout the house later (this would probably mean replacing real hardwood with a laminate of some sort - downgrade?)

Thanks in advance!

Find something to compliment (need input!)

Close enough won’t look bad

Get something we love and replace the rest later

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Comments (4)

PRO
mdln
6 years ago
Any choice is better than removing hardwood to replace it with laminate (a picture of hardwood).
decoenthusiaste
6 years ago
Do the stairs in black to work with your front door. If upstairs is all bedrooms and baths, I would just do carpet up there until you can save up for the matched hardwood downstairs. Hopefully they won't discontinue it. The Houzzer below didn't want to paint the treads but they would have been beautiful. Every home can use a touch of black. What material are the treads made of? Can it be painted?

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SJ McCarthy
6 years ago
IF you don't "love" the first floor wood COLOUR, then why are you trying so hard to match? It would just mean $$$ towards more of the same stuff you don't like.

Remember: hardwoods can be sanded and refinished. The stain on your wood is just a colour. Sand that baby down (when it needs to be done....a little later) and get the colour you really want. A full sand/refinish (Including stain and High-end polyurethane) = $5/sf.

That being said, the laminate upstairs is a throw-away type of floor. Once you've gotten tired of it, you simply rip it out and throw it away. You purchase something else and put it in. And you pay all the labout and all the dumping fees to get rid of it. And then you pay all the material costs and all the labout to install something new. Which means it gets more expensive to remove/replace the upstairs than it does to refinish the downstairs.

My advice is this: get the colour of 'whatever' product you want upstairs...knowing that in the future you will change the COLOUR of the hardwood DOWNSTAIRS. Same idea but you do NOT remove VALUABLE HARDWOODS to replace with disposable laminate. Don't. Do. It.

And to be clear, you will want to keep a stair runner anyway. Wood or laminate treads are SLICK! Like Olympic Bobsleigh slick! As in 'arse over teakettle' type of trips on a daily! So think about keeping carpet on the stairs (choose something that compliments both floors) and get the floor that you WANT to live with for the next 20+ years.

You will happy that you did.
daisiesandbutterflies
6 years ago
I was in a similar position as you 15 years ago. I didn't like what was there, but couldn't afford to replace everything. I did a "close match" to what was there, in hardwood, with the expectation that I would sand and restain "someday" and get everything to match. So here we are 15 years later, and we still haven't sanded and restained. So many other projects and expenses took (and continue to take) precedence, and now I want to replace my kitchen tile with hardwood, and if I do, I will need to sand/restain at that point.

My advice is to get what you want upstairs, keep/replace the carpet on the stairs, and some day you can match the downstairs to the upstairs. But if you go with "close enough", on my screen, the bottom sample looks like a closer match than the other two. I am curious, what is your choice flooring if you didn't try to match?