Refinishing & Sanding

The 5 services in this area

Which of these does your floor actually need?

If the wear is still in the finish, a screen and recoat is enough. Once wear has reached the wood, it takes a full refinish.

The distinction is checkable at home. Leave a drop of water on a dull traffic area for a few minutes. If it beads, the finish is intact and a recoat will restore it. If the wood darkens, the finish is gone there and a recoat would seal in the gray rather than remove it.

It matters financially, because a refinish consumes wear layer and a recoat does not. Every floor has a finite number of sandings in it, and recoating on schedule is what keeps that number from being spent early.

What refinishing will not fix

Sanding levels a surface. It does not correct moisture, subfloor movement, or damage that runs deeper than the wood available above the tongue.

A cupped floor is the clearest case. Sanding it flat before the moisture equalizes produces a crowned floor later, which is a worse result created by the repair itself.

Where a floor has no wear layer left, we say so rather than selling a sanding that cannot deliver.

How the work is quoted

Square footage is the starting point, not the answer — edge work, stairs, closets, stain, coat count and lead-safe requirements move it substantially.

A room full of closets, radiators and built-ins carries far more hand work per square foot than an open room of the same area, because the large machine only reaches the field.

In housing built before 1978 — roughly two thirds of the towns we serve — disturbing painted baseboards and stair components can bring EPA lead-safe requirements into the job.