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elle2931

Red oak hardwood stain - Duraseal stains

last year
last modified: last year

Hello - Just bought a new home and before moving in we are painting and refreshing flooring.

Does anyone have suggestions or opinions on Duraseal stain selection for our floors? The current stain is a golden oak look and has a very shiny varnish finish. Not sure the pictures portray that really well. We are refinishing the floors and are in the process of repainting all the walls Ben Moore Ballet White and trim White Dove. So walls won't be yellow! Ballet White is a warm off-white.

The living room gets a lot of light from South and West. The kitchen window faces East. The shades were down for the pictures so it may not look all that bright. The floors look darker too. Wish I would've opened the shades.

I want to do something more up-to-date for floors and definitely not the gym floor varnish finish look it currently has, but not sure what direction to go with stain color. Once sanded, we will consider natural. That said, I prefer dark floors, but my husband doesn't want them to be too dark. Jacobean that I really like is probably too dark.

Has anyone used Nutmeg? That's what we're considering as a compromise. Does it have a reddish tone? Don't want that. I know it's a personal choice but would love to hear your opinions. In a perfect world, we would be painting the kitchen cabinets white at some point. For now, I don't want the floor so matchy with the cabinets - it is too much of that golden oak color.




The dark squares on floor are LVP samples as we were considering laying over the oak but decided against that idea.



Hope to replace appliances with Stainless Steel before too long! Counter tops are a teal blue Corian that I would love to eventually replace with light quartz. But all in good time. We are going to live with the appliances and counter tops for now.


UPDATE 7/24/23: Decided on Nutmeg Duraseal stain with 3 coats of Bona water based sealant. No orangey or pinky color at all! I couldn't be happier. They did an amazing job. Walls are Ben Moore Ballet White and trim is Ben Moore Dove White. Didn't paint cabinets so just tried best to match trim to the existing cabinets. I am very pleased with the results.

Comments (7)

  • last year

    This is a hickory engineered hardwood that I love the color and look online. But like you say you can't judge online - I just know I want more a brown rather than a golden oak or reddish stain. Anyway this is my dream floor color here. I'm now wondering if the Duraseal medium brown would be good but it's almost as dark as Jacobean. By the way we stained the floor in our previous home Jacobean and I loved it. I might have to over-rule my hubby. :-)


  • last year

    Lol -- get out of my brain! We had a hickory engineered hardwood floor very much like that in our previous home (see pic) and I loved it too. This was our previous home:

    New floor · More Info


    But I hope you're just leaning toward mid-brown rather than attempting to get too close to the pic you posted, since it features hickory vs. red oak, it's wide plank, it's hand-scraped, etc. Now, both of us are dealing with a very different beast.


    No matter what color stain you choose, it's going to have a red cast unless you go very dark or take extra measures to reduce the red. There's a two-step product called Bona Red Out that can be applied to the raw wood after sanding, and it will neutralize a lot of the red and pink. You can also select a stain that has some green in it, since green is red's opposite on the color wheel. Since you like Jacobean, you could try mixing it with Duraseal Silvered Gray (a light color), and with Rustic Beige (a little darker), and with Provincial (darker, but still with a cool/ashy undertone).

    Elle thanked Alyssa Fernandez
  • PRO
    last year

    You need to get real life samples of the stain on your floor and I would want to make sure you can get this floor when you finally redo the kitchen becuase I bet that will be in the future and you will want all the floors to match. I do not usually like doing major changes before living in the space but the floors are hard to do after move in The info above is very helpful and I always prefer a very dark stain on red oak to eliminate the red as much as possible.

    Elle thanked Patricia Colwell Consulting
  • last year

    Thanks Particia - very helpful. I don't think what we're doing in the kitchen should impact the floor - hopefully not. We do want to do the floors before moving in for sure. The advice of using a dark stain on red oak is good to know. My floor guy keeps warning about darker floors being harder to keep clean. I guess he means it shows dust? That doesn't really make sense to me since I had dark hardwood floors in our last home and it was not at all hard to keep clean. We don't have pets - also we take off shoes in the house (for the most part). Anyway - thanks so much for weighing in.

  • last year
    last modified: last year

    Thoughts on this stain? It seems a tad gray which might counteract the inherent redness of red oak? I think this iwll be one of the ones I'll try out. Has anyone used this stain color on red oak? This is Duraseal "Aged Barrel".


  • last year

    I am testing that color now and it went white red.


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