Elite Hardwood Floors
Elite Hardwood Floors
Novato covers more ground than any other town in Marin, and the housing runs newer than most of the county. Much of what we work on here went up between the sixties and the nineties, plus the Hamilton Field neighborhood built out on the old air base. Newer framing means fewer surprises when we pull up what is there, though we still put a level and a moisture meter on every subfloor before quoting a number.
The bigger difference is the weather. Novato sits far enough inland to miss most of the fog that sits over the towns near the water, and it runs hotter through the summer. Wood behaves differently here than it does down in Sausalito. That changes how long we let new flooring acclimate before installing it, and on slab-on-grade homes it often points toward engineered.
Call today for a free estimate on installation, refinishing, or repair anywhere in Novato.
Acclimation is the step people skip, and Novato is the town where skipping it shows. Wood arrives at whatever moisture level the warehouse had. Your house is drier, especially through a hot inland summer, and the boards will give up moisture and shrink whether they do it in your living room before installation or after. Solid hardwood usually wants somewhere around a week in the house, sometimes longer. Engineered is more forgiving but not exempt. We meter the wood and we meter the subfloor, and we install when the two are close enough, not on a date we picked before the material showed up. It adds days to the front of the schedule. It is also the difference between a floor that looks the same in February as it did in August and one that opens up gaps you will be looking at for years. Houses down in San Rafael run damper and the numbers come out differently.
Most people can stay for an installation. Refinishing is the harder one, because sanding makes dust no matter how good the containment is, and the finish coats need air and time without anyone walking on them. Our sanders run on vacuum extraction and we seal off the work area with plastic and negative pressure, which gets the great majority of it, though we will not tell you it is zero. The usual pattern is that people stay through installation and go elsewhere for the two or three days of sanding and coating. Furniture has to come out either way. We can move it or you can, and the estimate looks different depending on which. Pets are the part people forget. A dog walking across a floor on its second coat is a repair, so plan for somewhere else to put them.