Hello everyone. Sounds like i finally found the right place to address my inquiries.
I recently hired someone to refinish the wood floors in my house. The carpet had been pulled up in the living room so i new that the wood was in good shape. However, when the vinyl flooring and plywood was pulled up in the adjoining dining room and hallway the wood had been water logged and rotted. I then had the contractor pull out the old, rotted wood in the dining room and hallway and have him install new maple in that area. He staggered the new flooring into the dinging room to try to make the change seemless.
Once the old flooring in the dining room had been sanded down it appeared to be a bit darker than the new maple floors in the dining room and hallway. My house is 60 years old and i assume the floors are original. I hope the guy didn't misdiagnos my original wood. The original wood was grades 2 and 3. There are a lot of knots and quite a bit of grain variation. For this reason I got him to get grade 2 maple for the replacement wood in the dining room and hallway. The grade 2 maple is, of course darker than the grade 1 and therefore will hopefully blend better with the old wood.
I actually had another prospective contractor claim that he thought it was pecan. The contractor I hired had said, prior to sanding it down, that he thought it was maple.

Irregardless, i now need to match the old and new wood with a stain. Are there any tricks i can mention to the guy would will be doing the finishing of the floors? I assume i will have to go dark but i have also heard that maple doens't take dark stains very well. As it tends to get splotchy and spread unevenly.

Just for clarity, i might mention that the old wood floors have a coffee/cream tone to them with quite a bit of grain while the new grade 2 maple floors are cream with some dark grain spots mixed in.

Dignodave:
That is a hard task even for the best finishers out there. With maple it is even harder and with new weaved in to the old floor it makes it challenge. Find and old pro for this one or someone who has handle this type of work before and not a newbe.

I don't know if it will be possible to find another person to come in and do what i am already paying someone else to do. Might inflame the situation. I have thought about just putting a mahogany finish on the floor to tottally obscure the differnece, but then again i don't know if it will take to maple very well.