We are adding an addition to our house, including a dining room off the living room. Currently most of the house is face nailed 2 1/4" wide 3/8" red oak strip flooring. The living room floor boards are directed towards the new dining room. We like the red oak floor and want to use something similar in the dining room. Since we can not get an exact match between new floor in the dining room and the old floor in the living room we have been playing with the idea of going with 3" or even 5" engineered read oak flooring in the dining room. The rooms are connected by a 6 foot wide doorway.

Will this look strange? We did play with the idea of changing the direction of the floor, but we have a feeling it would look strange with floor boards going cross wise in an 11x19' dining room. I guess the rectangular shape also rules out 45 degree angle.

Any thoughts on how to deal with this would be greatly appreciated.
We want to avoid refinishing our current floor.

Run a border around the field that is laid in the same direction as your existing floor.

Also there is a Canadian company Knight's of Medford, that manufactures 3/8" flooring. I don't think that they make a 2 1/4" in their 3/8" product but with a wide enough border it would be difficult to notice.


http://www.knightsofmeaford.com/products.htm