Ahoy !

Old wooden floors can be ruined by hiring inexperienced sanders and refinishers.

When you’ve been doing the same thing for over 50 years, you’ve seen it all and there are no surprises. I don’t know if Captain Lynn is still around, but call the sons, one of the Lynn brothers at Universal Floors 537.8900.

If you’re doing other major interior renovations, flooring should be done last.

You will need to identify your type old wood flooring, its thickness and suitability for sanding and refinishing.

Good luck, Hoyabulldog.

And felicitations, Jamie, well done. Flooring is the first impression, the first thing one notices upon first step over a threshold and through a doorway in entering a house or room.

Nice to have floors that shine.

Reformed Somali Pirate “Tantum Eruditi Sunt Liberi”

In case anyone is confused – the first pictures in the slideshow are BEFORE any work was done. The floors had been covered with some kind of dark brown lacquer which you can see in the first pictures. To see the results of the refinishing it’s probably easiest to just look on flickr and go to the end of the set.

I think they did a great job and the price was reasonable. I had used Universal Floors about ten years ago for a house in Mt. Pleasant as well which is why I called them this time. They came with good recommendations back then too.

While the estimate specifically excluded repairs (which is reasonable, since how could they know), they charged me exactly what they estimated at the beginning. They did a number of repairs including replacing two oak floorboards and a pine one upstairs, and a fair amount of patching cracks between floorboards. So they did that, sanded, and applied two coats of oil-based polyurethane.

There was no squeaky floor fixing – this isn’t really part of a typical floor refinishing job and could actually be pretty involved, I would imagine, since you’d have to either take up a lot of floor or access it from below. In any event I didn’t have any significant squeaking problems.