what's wrong with this picture?

I've been working on replacing a small section of hardwood flooring in the dining room that was an old duct patched with plywood. I figured it would be good practice for the more extensive floor repairs in the living room. So I bought some new 2 1/4 x 3/4 inch red oak flooring to fill the hole and feather in with the surrounding floorboards. The new and old boards' tongue & grooves fit together beautifully. The only problem is, when I line up the tongue & grooves along the length of the new and old boards, the tongue vs. groove on the ends of the boards don't match.

The original flooring in the house seems to have the ends of the floorboards milled backwards. (That, or each board was upside down when it had grooves milled into the underside???).

What the hell? Has anyone else heard of this happening?

So I guess this is why there was no apparent attempt by POs to make the newer hardwood on a third of the living room feather-into, or even line up with, the rest of the flooring in the room!

(Here's the living room now, with the bulk of our furniture crammed into the corner with the previous-owner-repaired flooring section that isn't painted green)

And here's the lovely line down the middle of the floor with misaligned (though exactly the same sized) boards:


So even though my original flooring is a standard size, I am not going to be able to use new flooring to make repairs and feather it in with the older floorboards the way I planned. (I'm tired of making splines and new grooves at the ends of the new floorboards to make them fit-- it's way too much work, though I am loving my $50 craigslist table saw :)).

This means a major change in strategy for re-doing the floors. I guess the new plan is to rip out some of the old living-room boards to patch the duct-holes. (I had hoped to use a few new boards to patch the duct holes before I had to start tearing up three quarters of the living room floor). Among other things, this means more of our floors are going to be torn up at any given time and we'll have to huddle against the walls for fear of falling.