We recently had new floors laced into the old floors, and all of it refinished to match. The installation on the new floor looks good, but there are many areas of the entire floor that are not up to my standards.

The stain looks splotchy in places. There are also areas where I can see streak marks, drip marks, and circlular sanding marks around the edges. To top it off, there were 3 big cracks in the new floor. The company's solution was to patch it, and it looks awful. Additionally, there are about 10 different areas where the poly needed to be re-applied. When they put more poly on, it picked up dust and the area of the floor is rough.

I explained my concerns to the flooring company, and was basically told they would fix only the problem areas. They would not resand, restain, re-buff, or apply new poly to the entire floor. I'm paying for a nice new floor, not a patch job. What shoud I do? Am I being overly critical?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/85887954@N ... 258025340/

Id say on this one its not that bad but not that great either. Some of the stuff I can see some I cant. A floor should be inspected from a standing position under normal light.

I spoke with the flooring company today and they said all of this is normal. I don't think there should be sand marks or picture framing in a brand new floor. Am I being too particular?

I've posted a few additional pictures.

If it were a totally new floor I could understand. But a patched up floor with some old stains, I might accept it. But then I do not expect a piano finish and neither should anyone else on an old floor.

It's pretty normal for low pay scale work. Hard to think a contractor would have that attitude unless they are working for cheap. NOt sure what part of the country your in but the average cost of s&f here is about 2.50 a sf. and thats cheap east Tn living.

I spoke with the flooring company today, and the guy was quite cpnfrontatoinal and rude. Many of these problems occur on the new floor.

We have red oak floors, and from what i have read, there is not much color variation. However, we have a lot of color variation between boards and within boards. He admitted that some of the bad areas were where the sander left marks or areas where they didn't sand enough to get the old stain off. He also told me that the stain he used was not what I had asked for and that they were staining the floor until late at night (when there was hardly any light). We just recently bought the house and have not moved in yet, so there isn't much additional light.

He rudely offered to redo the job, but I'm not sure if I trust he will do a good job (aside from his confrontational attitude). What should I do?

If I let him redo the floor, is there any way to ensure the stain looks more uniform across the wood? I read that wood conditioner will help, but makes the stain lighter. Is it reasonable to ask for conditioner and a darker stain?

A darker stain will be worse at showing sanding mistakes. Oak does not need conditioning it takes stain very well you just have to sand it properly. you will have variations between boards thats just how mother nature works no two boards are same. Sounds like I would get a second opinion, a confrontational guy who stains floors late at night sounds unprofessional.

Some of the blotches might be from resting their hands on the floors as they stained and could possibly be sweat.Hard to say for sure but those are pretty ugly and unnecessary . Otherwise , they did a decent job although not a great one.

The picture of the big machine line is actually pretty common.The grain is sideways on that board which makes buffing out the sanding line quite difficult. I don't see any machine lines on the adjacent boards.

You do seem to be very picky but the dark blotches should be dealt with and boards with big splits in them should probably be cut out and replaced. The filler they slopped in there looks very amateur.

Also, as mentioned, oak and every other wood species on the planet will have significant variations from board to board unless you hand select all the wood that will be used on your job .No flooring mill will hand select 100% light boards or 100% medium toned or 100% dark toned red oak for you.

The only way to get a wood floor to be close to uniform all the way across is actually very time consuming and tricky.It involves lots of extra steps beyond applying stain which involved wash coating the floor, staining, possibly tinting a second coat of sealer then coating, then buffing and additional tinted coats . The few of us that can do this charge quite a lot of money and it is a service that is above and beyond standard sanding and finishing.

Good luck with your project.