Elite Hardwood Floors
Elite Hardwood Floors
San Rafael is really two flooring markets in one city. Downtown, Gerstle Park, and the older neighborhoods off Fourth Street are full of homes on raised foundations with original oak underneath, and a good deal of that wood has never been touched. We pull up carpet in those houses fairly regularly and find a floor that is one sanding away from looking better than anything you could buy new.
Then there is Terra Linda. Joseph Eichler built roughly 900 homes up there between 1955 and 1965, and every one of them sits on a concrete slab with hydronic heat running through it. That rules out solid hardwood. You cannot nail into a slab, and solid wood over radiant heat moves in ways nobody wants. Engineered is the answer in an Eichler, glued down with an adhesive rated for radiant heat, and we have done enough of them to know where the tricky transitions are.
Whichever half of the city you are in, we will tell you what you are actually working with before we quote it. Call today for a free estimate on installation, refinishing, or repair.
An Eichler slab is not just a slab. There are hot water lines running through it, and they change how flooring has to go down. The adhesive has to be rated for radiant heat or it will let go over a few seasons of the slab warming and cooling. Before we glue anything we run the system up to normal operating temperature, hold it there, then bring it back down, so the slab has already done its moving before the wood is stuck to it. We also test the slab for moisture rather than assuming a sixty-year-old pour is dry. Then the floor goes down with the heat off, and comes back up slowly over several days rather than all at once. None of that is optional, and it is most of why an Eichler floor costs more than the same square footage in a raised-foundation house over in Larkspur.
Refinishing is priced by the square foot, and on the older houses off Fourth Street the number moves for reasons that have nothing to do with size. Stairs cost more than open floor because they are cut and coated by hand. Closets and small rooms cost more per foot than a big living room for the same reason. If the floor has been through a previous refinish with a stain color you want gone, that is more sanding, not less. And a floor with pet stains that soaked through into the wood may need boards replaced before anything else happens, since sanding does not remove what is under the surface. We walk the whole floor and give you the number with those things already in it. What you will not get from us is a low per-foot rate over the phone and a conversation about the stairs afterward.