Hardwood Flooring in Fairfax, CA

Fairfax has some of the oldest and smallest homes in Marin, many of them built in the twenties and thirties on wooded lots up the hillsides. Under the carpet in those houses you will often find original fir or narrow-plank oak. Fir is softer, it dents more easily, and it takes a slightly different hand on the sander to come out right.

Age cuts both ways here. Floors that old have real character and they are worth saving, but plenty of them have already been refinished two or three times by previous owners. We measure what is left of the wear layer before committing to a sand, because there is a point where a floor has given all it has and one more pass takes it down into the tongue and groove. We will tell you honestly which side of that line you are on.

Fairfax's narrow streets and steep driveways factor into scheduling too, and we plan around them up front. Call today and we will get you a free estimate on installation, refinishing, or repair.

Working With Fir Instead of Oak

A lot of the original floors in Fairfax cabins are Douglas fir, not oak, and it is a different material to work with. Fir is softer, so it dents where oak would not, and it also sands faster, which sounds convenient and is actually the risk. It is easy to take too much off, and easy to leave sander marks that oak would have hidden. Old-growth fir is also beautiful in a way modern fir simply is not, tight-grained and orange-toned, and it is worth the extra care. We run finer grits and take lighter passes on fir than we would on an oak floor of the same age. Stain behaves differently too, since fir takes color unevenly and can go blotchy without a conditioner first. If someone quotes you a fir floor at the same rate and schedule as oak, they may not have noticed which one you have. Older homes in Mill Valley turn up the same material.

Dust, and What a Containment Setup Actually Looks Like

Sanding a floor in a small occupied house is mostly a dust management job. Modern sanders run on vacuum extraction, so the dust goes into a sealed container rather than into the air, and that handles most of it at the source. The rest is containment. We seal doorways with plastic, tape off registers so the heating system does not carry dust into rooms we are not working in, and run the work area under negative pressure so air moves into the space rather than out of it. Anything staying in the house gets covered. We will not claim it is dustless, because that word gets used loosely in this trade and it is not true of anyone. What we will tell you is where the dust does end up and what we do about it, and then you can decide whether you want to be in the house for those days.