Wood floors?

The house we are buying has wood floors in about half of the house, they've had carpet over them for years. Had our first estimate today and the contractor said it could possibly be around the same price to rip everything out and lay prefinished 3/4" solid wood rather than laying unfinished boards in the rooms without and sanding/finishing everything. We are on a time crunch, and I love the idea of having minimal dust and minimal exposure to chemicals,, but I have prefinished floors in our house now and they get so banged up! Plus I hate how they aren't perfectly flat and where the boards meet they get so dirty. I also like that we could possibly get wider boards. Which would you choose and why?

Re: Wood floors?

I would get a hard quote on what it would cost. I was under the impression that new floors were a few thousand a room.

Wood floors?

DH works for a flooring company. They sell only prefinished flooring.
When we bought our house there was carpet in every bedroom. We wanted it out. Thought there was hardwood in all the BR's. There wasn't. We installed unfinished and sanded so we could match existing color/sheen level. It does match and looks great. But for less money (before discount) we could have installed prefinished and been done in a day instead of a month and a half. Prefinished can run anywhere from 3.99 a SF and up. And then there is install. Unfinished is cheaper for the wood but by the time you calculate labor to install, sand, stain and poly you are at just about the same price. And prefinished is done a lot quicker.

A big problem for us was the fact that we needed to do major repairs in 1 of the bedrooms. That is a big reason why we went our route. After we finished we said we should have just gotten something close to match the rest of the house and moved on.
Also this was all started and then sandy happened. Or contractor lost power and didn't work on our house for 2 weeks. We had to rush move into the house because our apartment lost power. The job was half done and delayed by 4 weeks because of it all.

Message edited 5/15/2014 11:14:10 PM.

Wood floors?

I would go with the site finished flooring, we did.

The above poster seems to indicate that site finished takes a lot longer, when most of the time was spent without work being done. If a flooring installer is working at it, it can be done in a few days, not weeks or months.

We did a full renovation of our house with a dormer and reconfigured. There wasn't anything salvageable from the original crappy narrow wood floors. We had the flooring company install new 3 1/4 oak and stain it. 1400 sqft, installed stained and finished in about 3-4 days. It wasn't cheap, but it was in line with the prefinished.

material on the prefinished may be $4 a sqft, but then factor in install and you're at really around $7 an up which was in the range of what I paid for my flooring.

What the OP flooring guy said doesn't really make sense unless the existing floors need a huge amount of patching etc and won't come out nice. sand and finish isn't that expensive, and for prefinished, they'd need to rip up existing and put new wood everywhere. Get actual quotes with details and from more than 1 person and make a decision.

Re: Wood floors?