I've never been a big fan of carpet, so even though our new house has some fairly decent carpet, one of the first things we did was to tear it all out. We knew that underneath there were hardwood floors (red oak) but we didn't know what condition they would be in. Unfortunately when we got them uncovered we found a couple of spots that were in pretty rough shape. We were planning on just doing a nice dark stain, but depending on how they turn out after sanding we may have to fall back on our backup plan of painting them. I have a feeling though that we may just end up staining them, and getting a rug to cover the real bad spots. We hope to sand the floors this weekend, so we'll see... We also went ahead and tore out all the baseboard and casings around the doors, and for the past two weeks I have been mudding and sanding them smooth. It should be a much cleaner look.