Fir floors

If you looked at the previous post you know that when the contractor took up the old floor we found fir floors! Our plan all along was to put in red oak to match the rest of the house. But finding the fir made us reconsider. We both started googling pictures and trying to decide (quickly!) what we wanted to do. Fir is soft and not always a good option for a kitchen. Plus it's a different look than red oak. It wouldn't necessarily go with our new kitchen. It's more of a rustic look. The more we looked around online we also discovered that the black stuff covering the floors may contain asbestos. It was probably the old glue used to lay down linoleum years ago and the glue often contained asbestos. Now I was worried! Dave scraped up a sample and dropped it off the next day at a lab that tests for asbestos. We paid a little more to get our results in an hour and it came back negative! I was shocked! So now we were back to making the decision to keep the fir or pull it up and go with our original plan and lay red oak in the kitchen. Ultimately we decided to get rid of the fir. I felt terrible getting rid of the old, original floor. They kept telling me that you can't find wood like that anymore. If we had decided to keep it the contractor told us he wasn't scraping off the layer of black glue. He said the floor guy could do it with his sander. The floor guy said he wouldn't do it because it would ruin his sander. So basically if we wanted to keep the original fir floors Dave and I would have had to scrape off the layer of black glue. That just wasn't happening. It was hard for Dave to scrape a small sample for the asbestos test.