Douglas Fir Flooring

Q: Our house was built in 1922. The majority of the house has oak flooring, but it seems that the bed rooms were done in Douglas Fir. A few years back, before we bought the house, there was a fire in our home. This fire ruined about 40 sqft in one bedroom. The wood was replaced with plywood and a carpet was installed over.
We would really like to restore the wood floor in the bed room. According to my research, at the time, Douglas Fir was cheap and used in many places. Now it seems that I can’t find it anywhere.
Do you have any suggestions, or maybe a wood that could go with the existing fir. The planks are 2 and 1/2 inches wide.
~Albert
A: Any case where you are trying to match new flooring to existing flooring is a difficult project. There are a few characteristics to Douglas Fir that make it rather hard to match up to. Douglas Fir has a rather straight vertical grain pattern with a rosy hue. This is off-set by Douglas Fir’s white to yellowish sap wood coloring and reddish brown knot colors.
There are two things you can do here. The easier choice as far as labor is concerned would be to replace the entire floor with a new wood floor type of your choice. From there you will install the new floor over the top of the old.
The harder option would be to find an unfinished Douglas Fir floor which matches the dimensions of your current floor. Install the new flooring then sand the entire floor to level and finish it so the entire floor has a uniform finish and appearance. This can be a bit difficult as find new flooring which matches the specs of your old floor could be rather hard. Your best bet would be to find a mill out of the Northwest (which is where most Douglas Fir comes from) and see about getting milled flooring.
At this point I would make sure you get a professional installer to help you out if you are going with the unfinished fir to match your current flooring.