Oh man did we have a hard time picking out flooring!  Our house will be open concept, so we plan to have hardwood throughout the whole house.  The only rooms that will not have hardwood are the bathrooms and possibly the basement.

While picking out hardwood, we had to consider how the floors would look with our kitchen cabinets.  Our builder uses Merillat Cabinets, the Classic Collection.  We selected the “Portrait” style maple cabinets in “Chiffon”, which is a soft off-white color.

That would be pretty easy to match, except we decided we wanted a darker colored kitchen island.  We chose the same style cabinets but in the “Kona” color, which is a dark wood stain.

Picking something that wouldn’t be too close to Kona, but looked good with the Chiffon proved to be more difficult then I thought it would be.

I have always wanted black floors and I quickly convinced Mike that they would look super slick.

But the black hardwood looked odd with the dark brown cabinets.  We decided to look at the opposite end of the spectrum and started looking at unfinished floors.

Mike vetoed the unfinished floors early on and we had to compromise.  We finally landed on a dark maple that is not too similar to the Kona cabinets.  We found a really great deal on a 4″ wide espresso maple for $4.25/sq ft. This is only .25 cents over our flooring allowance.