My building was built in 1906. My floors are the original fir. It's a reddish-gold color. I *love* my floors, they're so warm looking. In the sunlight, they just glow. I have several neighbors in my building who have replaced their floors with bamboo, and they're quite happy with it. To my eye it looks more modern, but it isn't jarring they've styled their places more modern as well, however. Best of luck with this decision! It's an important one. I love the look of the reused wood, personally, myself.

I absolutely love all three of the reclaimed oak examples. I think my favorite is the varigated color one; the photo with the floor lamp.

Well, you've heard most of my opinions already, but I wanted to give a dissenting opinion about the reclaimed wood. To me it would be entirely inappropriate in a Victorian. One of the consistent things about Victorian woodwork is that it does not have variated colors. Oh, they might use different light vs dark wood for accents, but all the wood for a floor would be the same question, generally with very little graining effect. Ditto for walls: the main part would generally be a finegrained wood stained so the graining is not too noticeable to get a consistent color. Victorians would have shuddered at all the knotty pine floating around today! And oak was considered cheap looking too. So I think the reclaimed wood would just be wrong, although it would be lovely in a farmhouse as you suggest. If you could get finely textured bamboo without too much color variation, I think it could look nice in a Victorian and not jarringly out of place. In my opinion, the key is uniformity of color.

I prefer wide planks and I believe they were actually preferred at the time. I think the use of wide planks decreased due to a lack of supply (too many big trees cut down for naval ships) rather than a preference for narrow.

I love the wide planked, antique floors.

For what it is worth, I prefer wide planks (3 1/2 inches or wider). I think too wide and too rustic, however, would be too informal for what you want. We just put in hardwoood floors at the Commons Condominium in Los Gatos where we will be spending a lot of time I think. We chose a distressed brazilian cherry from ARK. It was pre-finished and cost about $5.50 / sq. foot and another $4-5 / sq. foot to install not including baseboards. The installer was impresssed with the quality and it looks good. I don't know whether you're considering pre-finished but I think that is substantially less expensive and there are an unlimited number of choices and very durable depending on the type of wood. You can get hand scraped or distressed pre-finished flooring but I'm not sure you want too informal a look although I like the look in general. We found that there are numerous choices of all woods. Pecan and Chestnut are medium brown in color and not as red as Brazilian cherry although we found the redness in Brazilian cherry to vary significantly depending upon the manufacturer. If you decide on prefinished boards, at least based upon prices here, you should be able to find a quality choice for under $ 10 / square foot not including installation. I don't know if this helps and I claim no expertise other than what I learned through looking. Also, you probably don't want too soft a wood given children and a dog.