Flooring Installation

Most flooring problems are not flooring problems. They are subfloor problems. Before we open a single box we pull up a section of the old floor, check the deck for soft spots and loose fasteners, and run a straightedge across it. If the subfloor moves more than an eighth of an inch over ten feet, the new floor will telegraph it, and no amount of underlayment hides that.

Wood needs to sit in the house before it goes down. We deliver material three to five days ahead and leave it stacked in the room where it is going with the boxes open. A plank that rode in a cold truck and goes straight down in a heated house will shrink, and by February you have gaps you can catch a fingernail in. Engineered and vinyl plank are more forgiving, but we still let them sit.

For tile we set a proper mortar bed and use an uncoupling membrane over anything that is not dead-flat concrete. Over a wood subfloor in a the Carolinas house, tile set straight to plywood cracks along the joints within a couple of heating seasons. The membrane costs one day and a few hundred dollars in material. Re-tiling a floor costs the whole job again.

We undercut door jambs and casings with a jamb saw and run the flooring underneath rather than scribing around them. Transitions between rooms get a proper threshold, not a strip of trim tacked over a gap. Baseboard and shoe molding come off and go back on — we do not caulk the flooring to the wall and call it finished.

You get a written material list before we order, waste factor included, so you know what is being bought and what the leftovers are. Keep a box in the basement. Ten years from now a matching plank for a repair is worth more than the closet space it took up.