Elite Hardwood Floors
Elite Hardwood Floors
Mill Valley sits at the base of Mt. Tamalpais, and the same fog and canyon shade that keep the redwoods alive keep the humidity up inside a lot of houses here. Wood floors feel that. We see more seasonal movement in Mill Valley than almost anywhere else we work, boards that tighten up in September and open a little by March.
The housing stock is largely older, craftsman and cottage-style homes on raised foundations with crawl spaces underneath. That is usually good news, because it means real solid oak or fir under whatever is on top, and solid wood can be sanded and brought back several times over. It also means the crawl space is worth a look. A damp one under an otherwise healthy floor is the most common reason we get called back to a Mill Valley house a second time.
If your floors are original and just tired, refinishing is usually where we would start. Call today for a free estimate.
Almost every solid wood floor in Mill Valley moves a little through the year, and most of that is normal. Wood takes on moisture when the air is damp and gives it back when the air dries out, and in a canyon that fogs in most of the year the swing is bigger than it would be inland. Thin gaps between boards in the wet months that close up by late summer are the floor doing what wood does. What is not normal is a gap that never closes, a board that has cupped so the edges sit higher than the middle, or a section that has lifted off the subfloor entirely. Those point at a moisture source rather than a season. We measure at the floor and underneath it before deciding which one you have, because the fix for a seasonal floor is nothing at all, and the fix for the other one is not the floor. Down the hill in Sausalito the marine air pushes the same problem further.
If the crawl space under a Mill Valley house is damp, the floor above it is going to keep taking on moisture from below no matter what we do on top. That is the single most common reason a refinish here does not hold. So we look underneath first. Often what is missing is a vapor barrier, which is heavy plastic laid across the dirt to stop ground moisture from evaporating up into the framing. Sometimes it is there but torn, or was never sealed at the edges. Drainage and grading outside the house matter too, and neither one is flooring work. We will show you what we found down there and what order to tackle it in, even when that means the floor waits. Sanding and coating a floor that is still being fed moisture from underneath is money spent on a result that will not last.