Colleyville Flooring: Installation, Refinishing and Repair

Colleyville is at the age where the most valuable thing we do is talk people out of replacing a floor.

The refinishing case

A great many houses here went up between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s with solid oak through the main rooms. That timber is now twenty-five to forty years old, it has one worn finish on it, and it looks tired. The instinct is to rip it out and put down something new.

A three-quarter inch solid board has roughly six to ten full sandings in it across its whole life. If a floor has been sanded once, or never, there is a lot left. Refinishing costs a fraction of replacement, produces a floor of better quality than most of what would replace it, and keeps timber that is no longer cheap to buy.

So the first thing we do on a Colleyville estimate is measure remaining board thickness. If there is enough, we say so — even when the enquiry that brought us out was about new flooring.

Two slab generations in one city

The 1970s and early 1980s stock sits on conventional slabs with rebar. Those have had forty-odd years to settle and flatness is a present-tense measurement, not something to infer from the build date.

From the late 1980s onward it is post-tension: steel tendons under high load, running on no predictable grid. Nothing gets cut, cored or fastened into one until the cables are located.

That split runs straight through this city, sometimes street by street, which is why we ask the build year before anything else. The two houses need different work under the same floor.

Screen and recoat, and when to say wait

Not every tired floor needs a full sand. If the finish is worn but has not been breached through to bare timber anywhere, a screen and recoat costs a fraction of a refinish and buys years.

Once the wear reaches raw wood, or there is water staining or pet damage in the boards, recoating just seals the damage in and you have spent money to keep looking at it. We check before recommending, and if you are early we will tell you to come back in two years rather than sell you the bigger job now.

The ground

Cross Timbers sandy loam through most of the city, heavier toward the south. Better draining and considerably less expansive than the Eagle Ford clay on the other side of Fort Worth, so slab movement is a smaller factor here than it is in Arlington or Mansfield. Preparation is more often grinding than a levelling pour.

What we do most here

Refinishing, first and foremost. New hardwood where a floor genuinely is spent, usually engineered glued down over the post-tension slabs. And tile, where the kitchens and entries of the 1990s builds are being reworked.