We have a beautiful living room and kitchen -and corner bedroom- which are not quite yet done (ceiling, in particular) but we love them. The floors are natural and they have a water-based polyurethane on them which I highly recommend. However, I must tell you though you would never know, that these floors were stained Minwax Jacobean three times before they got to stay natural. The first time, we hadn't done a good job sanding and the stain didn't adhere so we sanded it off. The second time we stained it, the first coat of Super Fast Drying Minwax Polyurethane didn't dry for a week. It turns out we maybe didn't wipe up all of the stain very well and the polyurethane wasn't sticking to it. So we sanded it off and did it again but took hours to carefully wipe up all of the excess stain immediately so that there was no residue at all on the floors when we put down Minwax Fast Drying Polyurethane. Three days later it was wet so we took it off again, afraid if it wasn't adhering to our floor that it wouldn't last. We're happy now and will never use Minwax again.
Here's a shot of our fireplace. It still needs a mantle and wood around the base of the hearth, but it looks so much better than it used to. I put a before picture up just to compare.
And just for fun, we got some cool new dining room chairs...
