Floors are stained!

I -must- preface this post by saying the photos are inadequate.

Yes, we've stained the floors a rich chocolate brown. But in these photos they look nearly like we just painted them black, which is not the case. It's simply hard to get decent photos of the "outcome"...

The best 'real" representation of how they look is the two little spots in the first picture where the sun is hitting them. It's a warm, rich color. It's certainly dark, but you definitely still see the wood tone and grain through it.

Now... if any of you are saying "oh my God, you stained those lovely natural floors dark, how could you?"... I hear you. I get it. My preference is probably for 'natural' too. BUT what you can't see in the photos is that the floors were a bit more beat-up than we might have hoped when we pulled up carpets. They were also very uneven - over the years someone had stained around area rugs, leaving light spots in the middle and dark edges... Ugh.

We could have sanded down past the damage and the miscoloration. BUT that would have left us with floors about 3/8" thick (they've been sanded once before at some point since 1937) at which point they're too thin and get very creaky, warpy and weak.

Mind you, I do like the look of dark floors with light walls and white trim. I don't feel like we're 'suffering' ... Just saying "keep 'em natural" wasn't a good choice.