Hardwood, Engineered & Laminate

Most wood floor problems are not wood problems. They are subfloor problems. Before we open a box we pull up a section of the old floor, check the subfloor for soft spots and loose fasteners and run a straightedge across it. If it varies more than an eighth of an inch over ten feet, the new floor will show it, and no underlayment hides that. Soft or water-damaged sheets get replaced, loose sheets get screwed down and raised seams get sanded flat.

Wood needs to sit in the building before it goes down. We deliver material ahead of the start date and leave it in the room where it is going, at the temperature and humidity the room normally holds. Then we meter both the wood and the subfloor. A plank that goes down much wetter or drier than the floor under it will shrink or swell once it settles, and by the next season you have gaps you can catch a fingernail in, or boards cupping at the edges.

Every wood floor needs room to move. Solid hardwood, engineered wood and laminate all expand and contract with the seasons, so we leave an expansion gap at every wall, column and fixed object and hide it under the baseboard or shoe molding. A floor pinned tight to the walls has nowhere to go in a humid summer, and it pushes itself up off the subfloor. Large open areas get the extra breaks the manufacturer calls for, which is why a floor that runs through several rooms is planned before the first row goes down.

The three materials go down differently. Solid hardwood is nailed to a wood subfloor and can be sanded down and renewed several times over its life. Engineered wood has a real hardwood wear layer over a stable core, so it can be nailed, glued to concrete or floated, and it handles slabs and lower levels where solid wood does not belong. Laminate is a printed wear layer over a fiberboard core. It floats over an underlayment, wears well and costs less, but it does not tolerate standing water at the seams, so we steer you away from it in rooms where water regularly ends up on the floor.

We undercut door jambs and casings and run the flooring underneath rather than scribing around them. Transitions between rooms get a proper threshold or reducer, not a strip of trim tacked over a gap. Baseboard and shoe molding come off and go back on. You get a written material list before we order, waste factor included, and the extra boxes stay with you. Years from now a matching plank for a repair is worth more than the closet space it took up.