When I bought my house, it had these built-in cabinets in the dining room area. They look good from far away, but a closer inspection revealed how warped and worn they were:
They must have been thirty years old, and it looked like every owner of the house since then made some kind of change to them. My wife and I decided to demo them, but we realized too late that the hardwood floors had lightened considerably since the original built-ins were put in. Since the floor we exposed was darker than the rest of the house, and since there was no way we were going to refinish the floors after moving in, we reluctantly decided to build new ones.
