in praise of pine  

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Many of the older homes in Palm Beach have flooring and framing constructed using what is referred to as Dade county pine, which I believe is a variety of the Slash Pine..because it is termite resistant. Many of the ceilings are of Pecky Cyprus, also termite proof. I find it all divine.
http://as usual...no fucking link..sorry.

I used to use a lot of Hoop ...
I used to use a lot of Hoop pine, a local species that is very good, virtually no knots and what there is very tiny, but the price has shot up and the companies are a bit cagey about confirming its plantation grown status. This is what can be done with the ply, amoung many other things. I used to work for the plywood mill that produced it, most fantaical attention to qulaity I've ever experienced in a factory, was a joy to work there.
Light fitting by David Trubridge.
http://www.vwa.org.au/des_vichard_hp.htm

Heath, that is a lovely room.
Heath, that is a lovely room.

Here's
a folding pine table I made a dozen years ago; I made four of them. I retained one, which was finished with stain-colored Deft brushable lacquer.
The issue of joint strength is addressed here by eliminating traditional tenon or dowel joinery in favor of large-area lapped joints, glued with polyurethane adhesive. I think this table could be dragged down the street behind a car and not lose any of its parts -- for a block or so, at least ! It will certainly never develop racking or looseness of the joints. . .
There is admittedly a lot of material in this design, and the table is quite heavy. The cheap price of the pine made this practical for in inexpensive product.

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A bit Greene and Greene, I like it and good idea to use the laps, they could even have been pinned with split dowels I suppose.

Not real big on pine....

We had pine floors
in our first home. It was a 100 year old building. The first thing we did when we moved in was to pull up the shag carpeting, then the linoleum from the 1930s, then the newspaper (that's right, no glue just newspaper under the linoleum. Cool to read the old papers and see the period ads, etc.) what was exposed was the original floor which was painted around the edges of each room, but not in the centers. Just the raw pine floor. I guess that back in the day they used rugs and then just painted the portion that was exposed. There were at least three layers of paint in most rooms.
We set out to make the original floor useable. We striped the paint on the outside edges and sanded the entire floors before trying to stain them and seal them. As soft as the pine was (it would dent if you dropped something) it did not take the finish very well and would wear off in the higher traffic areas.
We could not leave the original light color as there were white plaster walls and much darker original oak door frames and baseboards. I liked the rather rustic quality to the floor and would have liked it better if we'd had more Scandinavian furniture at the time.

Interesting
story. Thanks ! I might have tried to adjust expectations and left the pine in its raw state -- thus avoiding the problems with stain that you mention ?
One of the things we repeat to the new owners of old homes is to live with the existing conditions for a season (four seasons, for those in temperate zones) to let the house speak to you, before carrying out any plans. That is, one might pare back the accumulated accretions, and then let the architecture -- the original forms and materials -- have their say. But often we want to "get on with it" and impose our will on what we find -- if only to "make the house our own," as it were. . .?
I can see the dark hardwood trim and the light pine floor seeming to clash. Seen another way, that contrast would be no different than a light carpet in a dark room -- not such an unusual choice ?

SDR
I don't think we really had any expectations, so there was little to adjust. We were just trying to make the home habitable. We had two months to get it to a state where we could move in. We had to vacate our old apartment and we were not going to be demolishing plaster walls and sanding floors while we lived there. We also needed a kitchen and bathroom that were functional. We may not have made it an example of high design, but we could not live with the "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" aesthetic that had been cultivated over the decades.
I'm afraid that if we tried to live with the existing conditions and waited for the house to speak to us it would have said "GET OUT!" in the middle of the night from somewhere deep below the basement.
There are certainly things I'd do differently if I had to do it over again (like hire someone to do some of the work instead of doing it all ourselves!) but all in all, I think we did little damage and brought the place back from a very scary place. Judge for yourself:

Oh, yea.
Those pine floors.
You can't see the before under the sticky shag carpeting, but you can see the after: