Extending/transitioning wooden flooring in extension?

[timealone]

We have just had an extension done, which has doubled the size of our living/dining room. The old part has engineered wood flooring which we put down about 3 years ago, and it is stuck to the sub floor rather than floating. We're trying to decide what to do in the new part, which will become the living room bit (the old bit will be dining/playroom). The whole room is ~20x20 feet with the old and new parts each being ~10x20 feet.

One option is to buy the same floor again for the new part of the room, which we can do as they still sell it. The problem is there is batch to batch variation in colour and the shop said it will look obviously different. Option 2 is to get a wooden floor in a different colour so that there is an obvious contrast. The current floor is quite a rich/reddish colour, so we would probably go for something in light oak. I'm not sure which option would be best really. Tearing up everything and starting again is not an option due to cost and time.

The only other option is to put cheap carpet down and reassess in a couple of years. The only problem with this is that we have bifold doors across the entire back of the room, so we would be going in and out and stepping directly onto carpet which isn't ideal.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Can you buy a pack.of the same flooring and put it out next to the existing floor to see how obvious the difference is?

If you have carpet for now you can always put doormats or a runner down.

We tried to match the flooring into our extension, we weren't even pre warned by the shop that there would be a difference in colour/finish. It actually looked the same until they put it down but now it's down it really notices it's a lot duller and the new stuff is actually horrid shows every Mark unlike the stuff we had five years ago which is brilliant. They took up a couple of strips to run it through from the old room into the new extension so Id have to change the whole downstairs to get rid of it which I'm never going to do.
So I guess what I'm saying is if I did it again I would 100 per cent go for a contrast and not try and match it as it bugs me every day of my life. Several times!

Only other thought is to put a rug in the middle of where you put the join? Wouldn't work for me really as the join is in a door way but have often thought about it!

OK thanks, I think we're leaning towards a light oak floor to contrast to the current one. I will ask the shop if they can give me a sample, but so far they've been pretty unhelpful and have basically just suggested replacing everything.

I don't think we would put a rug across the join as the sofa will already be over part of it, IYSWIM. I think we will have a rug in the middle of the living roon bit though. I was initially hoping that the sofa would break things up enough so that the floor change would t be noticeable, but I'm having cold feet now.

Go on Pinterest and search for transition flooring and there are some nice timber to tiled floors, might be worth a look.

The only real way to get a smooth transition is to take up any part planks in the current room, and then continue flooring into the new room (assuming the planks run in that direction?), but they would need to match exactly for it to work.

How about laying carpet but laying a threshold by the folding doors either in timber or stone? We have carpet in the living room but a 400mm wide tumbled edge limestone threshold and it's a rather nice feature. You could use the similar engineered board that you have found as the threshold.