Minwax is pretty low quality. I wouldn't use it in my home. If you want color on the floors, then stain them and use a water based poly like Bona.

Don't be penny wise and pound foolish here. While DIY is certainly doable, your difficult criteria, lack of experience, and potential use of low quality products doesn't promise a good outcome. You will walk on these floors every single day. They will either add value to the home, or they will look like crap for years and need to be redone by a professional before you sell and you'll never get to enjoy their beauty.

Here I differ with hollysprings regarding both Minwax products and water base polyurethane finish such as Bona.

Our highly reputable floor refinisher used exactly this mix. The Minwax stain was never the problem, looks great, but the Bona waterbased finish, oh my! It went right into the stained wood, and in spite of multiple coats offered NO protection as a finish. We never will know if a sealer was used in between, but the brief contract did not mention a sealer after stain.

Go with the Minwax oil-based poly as finish and use their stain too (always match stain/finish to same manufacturer as that is how they do their durability tests on wood). Polyurethane wood floor finish is much, much more durable (ALL our prior homes had this) and you won't have to re-do your pound foolish mistake a second time.

Good luck, and know your contract details well.

This post was edited by SparklingWater on Tue, Apr 9, 13 at 21:39

I agree with hollysprings about Minwax products and disagree with Sparklingwater about Bona finishes. Difficult to say what was at fault with the finish job, as there is no way to tell if the job was done properly or not and what specific products were used.

Because this was raised in another thread, I will repost my response in that other thread here for anyone's interest:

Sorry to hear about some consumer problems with waterbourne polyurethane. However, that is not my experience. Not one of my customers has ever had a wear problem with the products I use, and I have been doing this for almost twenty years with waterbourne the only fim-build finish I specify. I would not specify or use anything else; the results are consistent and the technology is proven. If you use top shelf products, you will get top shelf performance.

Any wood floor finish can be problematic when applied contrary to manufacturer directions, so that sometimes can be factored into disappointment with a product. Also, there are cheap products in both types of film-build finishes and quality ones in both. You generally do get what you pay for in wood floor finishes. My guess is those who experience disappointment with waterbourne polyurethanes is because either a cheap product was used or it was improperly applied.

I agree with Glen and Holly. In all of the kitchens that I've done, I've never had any issues with a good quality water borne finish coupled with an installer who I knew knew what he was doing. When there have been problems, it's usually been due to DIY inexperience and/or low quality product (yes, Minwax is low quality) or a "professional" installer that didn't follow manufacturer's recommendations.

I had no problem with miniwax stain or poly.