Elite Hardwood Floors
Elite Hardwood Floors
Local crews serving homeowners from Sausalito to Novato, with straight pricing and floors built to last.
You walk on your floors more than you touch anything else in your house. Pick the wrong backsplash and it's a little annoying every time you cook. Get a floor wrong and you feel it under your feet in every room, every day, for as long as you own the place.
Here's the thing about flooring mistakes: they don't show up on day one. A subfloor that wasn't leveled right, boards nailed down before the wood finished acclimating to your house, a finish that went on too thin. None of that looks wrong at the final walkthrough. It shows up eighteen months later as a squeak that won't quit, a gap between boards wide enough to catch a sock, or a finish that's already dulling in the hallway.
We build every job assuming you'll still be living on it in thirty years, because a solid hardwood floor that goes down right and gets sanded a few times along the way will outlast most of the rest of the house. Marin's fog and humidity swings put more stress on wood than most inland counties ever see, which is why acclimation and subfloor prep matter more here than they do in a drier inland climate. Most of what we do is new hardwood installation and refinishing existing floors, and the same prep discipline applies either way.
New solid or engineered hardwood, installed square, level, and acclimated properly before a single nail goes in. We'll walk you through wood species and construction options so the choice fits your home, not just a showroom floor.
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Real color matching, dust containment while we sand, and a finish schedule that holds up under Marin's humidity swings. If your floors still have wood left to work with, refinishing usually costs a fraction of tearing them out.
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Water damage, pet scratches, squeaks, boards that have started to cup or buckle. We fix what's salvageable and match new wood to old so the patch doesn't stand out.
Learn More →We give you the real number before we start. No padded estimate that turns into a surprise invoice halfway through.
If a refinish buys you another ten years, we'll say so instead of pushing a full tear-out.
We protect the rest of your house while we work, and the crew cleans up at the end of every day they're here.
Tell us the square footage and the wood type, or what's going on with your current floor, and we can usually give you a ballpark before we ever step inside.
We check subfloor condition and take moisture readings on the wood and the subfloor both, then confirm the number in writing. If we find something that changes the price, you hear it then and not later.
New wood gets time to acclimate, the rest of your house gets protected, and the crew cleans up every day.
We don't call a job done until you've looked at it in daylight and signed off.
Marin is not one flooring market. Homes in San Rafael split between raised foundations with original oak underneath and the Terra Linda slab houses where solid wood is not an option at all. Mill Valley and the canyon towns run damp enough that acclimation time genuinely matters. Out in Novato it is drier and hotter and the wood moves the other direction. Same county, different job.
What that means in practice is that we check moisture and subfloor condition before quoting rather than after. Older Marin homes have settled, additions rarely line up with the original house, and a floor laid across that seam without accounting for it will telegraph the difference inside a year. We would rather find that on the walkthrough than have you find it later.
"They matched the stain on our repair so well I couldn't find the patch a week later, even knowing exactly where to look."
— Karen, San Rafael"Straightforward pricing and they actually showed up on the day they said they would. That alone put them ahead of the other quotes we got."
— Mike, Novato"Our floors had cupped pretty badly after a slow leak under the dishwasher. They explained what actually caused it and fixed that, not just the boards on top."
— Denise, Mill ValleyRefinishing is priced by square footage, and the two things that move the number most are how many coats the floor needs and whether you are changing the stain color. A straight sand and recoat in the same color is the low end. Water damage, pet stains that soaked through the wood, or a color change all add to it.
Most whole-floor jobs run three to five days from first sand to last coat, and the finish needs time after that before furniture goes back. Most people stay elsewhere during the sanding days and come back once we are on finish coats. We give you the schedule up front so you can plan around it.
Material is usually the bigger half of the number, not labor, so the species and construction you pick drives the price more than anything else. After that it is subfloor condition, whether there is old flooring to pull up, and how much of the job is cuts and transitions rather than open run. We price those separately so you can see what is what.
Most rooms go down in two to four days once we start, but the wood usually sits in the house before that. New flooring needs to come to the same moisture level as the room it is going into, and skipping that is how you get gaps in February. Depending on the material and the house, that is anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. Site-finished floors add sanding and coating time on the back end. We give you the whole schedule, acclimation included, before anything is ordered.
It depends on how much wood is left above the tongue and groove. A solid floor nobody has touched has plenty. One that previous owners already sanded two or three times may not have enough left for another pass, and going anyway cuts down into the tongue. We measure before committing to a sand and tell you which side of that line your floor is on.
Mostly it comes down to what is under the floor. Solid needs something to nail into, so a house on a concrete slab, which includes a lot of Marin's mid-century homes, generally rules it out. Engineered also holds up better in wide planks and in rooms that swing more with humidity. We will tell you which one your house actually calls for before you go shopping.
Sometimes. If water got under the boards and they have cupped, sanding them flat too early makes it worse once the wood finishes drying and settles back down. The order matters. We would rather find the source, fix it, and let the floor come back down than sand a floor that is still moving.
