Burnsville Wood Flooring installs, sands and refinishes wood flooring in St. Louis Park, and has been doing that work for more than twenty years. Most of what we are called out to look at is not an empty room waiting for a new floor. It is a floor that already exists, under carpet or under three coats of somebody else’s polyurethane, and the first question is what is actually down there.
So the first visit is a measuring visit. We read the indoor relative humidity and write the number down, we take moisture content on the flooring and on the subfloor and compare the two against each other, and we look at how the boards are sitting in the room. A wood floor is specified for a band that most heated Minnesota houses fall out of every January, and knowing where a house sits in that band changes what we recommend.
What comes back with the quote is a written grit sequence and a finish schedule, so the finished job can be checked against something other than an opinion. The crew that walked the house is the crew that runs the sander and rolls the last coat.
An old housing stock, old in the postwar way
There are 25,933 housing units in the city, and 44.4 percent of them went up before 1960. The largest single decade is the 1950s, which accounts for 23.6 percent of everything standing today.
Local history explains the shape of that number. In 1940 there were 7,737 people living here, and by 1955 more than 30,000 new residents had joined them; the streetcar was eliminated in 1954, in the middle of that build-out. What went up to house those arrivals was rambler after rambler, and the floor that went into them was oak strip run continuously through living room, hall and bedrooms.
That cohort makes for a specific kind of quote. The house is old enough to have a real hardwood floor under whatever was laid on top of it later, and new enough that the floor is usually one uninterrupted field rather than a patchwork of separate rooms. We pull a register or lift a closet threshold before pricing anything, so the boards, the fasteners and the subfloor are seen rather than guessed at.
Thirty-six neighborhoods, one construction era
The city recognizes 36 official neighborhoods, among them Lenox, Elmwood, Brookside, Browndale, Crestview and Aquila. The names vary far more than the floors do, and two houses in different neighborhoods built in the same decade usually ask for the same grit sequence and much the same repairs.
What gets measured before anything is priced
Indoor relative humidity is read and written down on the first visit, because thirty to fifty percent relative humidity is the band most solid flooring is specified for and a forced-air house in deep winter does not stay in it. Moisture content readings are taken on the flooring and on the subfloor and compared to each other, since the moisture content differential between the two is what decides whether boards sit flat after acclimation. Those numbers, and the hygrometer and moisture meter they came from, are part of the written record handed over with the quote.
Looking for wood-flooring closer to West St. Paul? See West St. Paul Wood-Flooring.
What a 1950s strip oak floor is, and what it is not
The standard floor of this cohort is two and a quarter inch red oak strip, tongue-and-groove, nailed down over a board or plywood subfloor with cleats or staples. It was finished in place, which is the whole reason it can be sanded now. What it is not is a prefinished or engineered floor: there is no factory bevel between the boards and no thin wear layer sitting over a manufactured core.
How much floor is left
A solid strip floor has several sandings in it across a long life, and one that has already been taken down twice is a different job from one still sleeping under its original carpet. We look for overwood at the seams, cupping or crowning across the board faces, lathe checks in the grain, and the places where an earlier edger cut deeper than the drum sander did. Where a board is past saving we replace it, weaving new stock into the field or setting a dutchman patch where a register or a wall was removed, rather than chasing the damage down through the whole floor.
Gaps in January, closed again by June
Strip oak shrinks across the grain when the indoor air dries out, and a floor of this width shows that as seasonal gapping through the heating season. We measure the gaps and explain them before anyone calls the floor defective, because a good share of them close again by June. Dry cupping, where the face of each board sits low between its edges after weeks of dry heat, is a humidity problem to solve rather than a floor to sand flat.
Timing matters here as much as measuring does. Where a floor can wait, we sequence the installation and the finish around the heating season rather than in spite of it, and where it cannot wait, we say plainly what the floor is likely to do in its first winter.
Recoat, or a full sand
A screen-and-recoat abrades the existing finish with an abrasive screen and lays a fresh coat over it, and on a floor whose finish is worn but not worn through, that is both the right answer and the cheaper one. Once the wear has gone into the wood itself, a screen buys a year and no more. We quote the two against each other honestly, including the jobs where we tell you to take the recoat, and a full sand is a 36-50-80 grit sequence with the edger and buffer following the drum sander, then sealer and either waterborne or oil-modified polyurethane depending on the sheen level you want.
Engineered flooring gets one extra step before any refinishing quote. We measure the wear layer, because past a certain thinness there is nothing left to sand and the honest conversation is about replacement rather than refinishing.
Pre-1978 stock, and the rule that follows from it
Of the housing here, 65.8 percent was built before 1980, which puts most of it on the older side of the 1978 line that the federal lead-safe rules draw. Minnesota is not on the EPA list of authorized Renovation, Repair and Painting states, so the EPA administers that program directly here, and federal firm and renovator certification governs renovation that disturbs paint in pre-1978 housing.
Refinishing a floor is not painting, but the machines run right up to the baseboard and the edger works within an inch of it. Where painted trim, a painted stair stringer or a painted threshold sits in the work area, the age of the house is a real question, and it belongs in the quote rather than in a surprise on the second morning.
Dust containment, and what it does not catch
Every sanding job runs with containment: the equipment is connected to collection, doorways and openings are sealed, and the work area is isolated from the rest of the house. What we also tell people is what containment does not do, because it is not a clean room and fine dust still finds the tops of door casings and the inside of a nearby closet. A house on forced-air heating wants its returns covered during the work and its filter changed afterward.
The permit question
Minnesota Rules 1300.0120, subpart 4, item A exempts painting, papering, tiling, carpeting, cabinets, countertops and similar finish work from the permit requirement, and ordinary flooring work sits in that group. The same subpart is explicit that an exemption does not authorize work in violation of the code or of any other law or ordinance, which is why the lead-safe rule still governs a job no permit was needed for. If a floor job turns into structural repair of a subfloor or a joist, that is a different conversation and we raise it before starting rather than after.
The inspection that comes inside the house
Selling a house here involves a step many cities do not have. A property maintenance point-of-sale inspection is required whenever an owner or the owner’s agent intends to sell or transfer a property, and it must be done before the property is listed. An inspector from the city’s Building and Energy Department checks that the siding, the roof, the garage and the interior comply with the city’s property maintenance code.
The interior half of that is the part that reaches the floors. A typical inspection takes about forty-five to sixty minutes, and the property maintenance certificate is presented to the buyer and the title company at closing. Certificates issued for single family homes, townhomes and duplexes are good for one year, while condominium certificates are valid for two.
Because the inspection comes before listing rather than after an offer, sellers who have decided to refinish first are working to an earlier date than they expected, which makes this a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Finish has a cure time as well as a dry time, and the gap between those two is what a rushed job usually gets wrong. We would far rather quote a February job for an April listing than be asked to sand, seal and coat in the week before the photographer arrives.
Rentals, and units above other units
Owner-occupied units are 57.8 percent of occupied housing here, and 78.8 percent of those owner-occupied units are one-unit detached houses. Most of the rental side sits in larger buildings, with 77.5 percent of renter-occupied units in structures of ten or more units, but the scattered single-family, duplex and townhome rentals are the ones needing an annual city business license before a tenant moves in. Owners of those properties want the floors done in the gap between tenants, and a hard move-in date is something we build the finish schedule backward from.
Above the first floor the paperwork changes again. Association and board approvals for an upstairs unit, including the impact insulation class and sound transmission class figures a board asks about and the underlayment that answers them, are settled before the first board goes down. Sorting that out at the front end is how a job avoids being stopped halfway through with a floor half installed.
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