North Richland Hills Flooring: Installation, Refinishing and Repair

North Richland Hills covers more ground and more decades than the other Mid-Cities, and it has more staircases than any of them. That turns out to shape a surprising amount of the work.

Stairs are their own job

Stairs take more labour per square foot than anything else in flooring, and they are the part of a quote most often folded into a whole-house area figure — which is how a bid comes in low and then goes up.

We price stairs as a separate line. What it costs depends on the profile and on which finish you want. A waterfall install runs the carpet straight over the nosing. An upholstered install wraps and fixes it around the profile, takes noticeably longer, and on the open-tread staircases in the 1970s and 1980s split-levels here it looks like a completely different staircase.

Fibre matters more on stairs than anywhere else, because traffic concentrates on the nosing. Nylon resists crushing considerably better than polyester and is what belongs there almost regardless of what goes in the bedrooms.

Where a client wants hardwood on the stairs instead, treads, risers and nosings are a joinery job rather than a flooring one, and it is quoted as such.

Two slab generations

The 1960s and 1970s ranch stock sits on conventional slabs that have had fifty years to settle. The late 1980s onward is post-tension, with steel tendons under load that get located before anything is cut, cored or fastened.

Home Town and the newer developments are firmly in the second category. That rules out nailing solid hardwood to the slab, which is why nearly all our new wood work here is engineered glued down or a floated overlay.

Second-storey floors move differently

The other consequence of a two-storey stock is deflection. A soft or bouncy spot upstairs is more often a joist span issue than a wet subfloor, which is the opposite of the usual diagnosis in the single-storey ranch cities nearby.

It matters because the repairs are different, and because tile upstairs needs a stiffer floor than tile on a slab does — commonly held to L/720 rather than L/360 under stone or large format. A tile floor over a springy span will crack no matter how carefully it is set.

Freeze damage

Two-storey houses give a burst supply line more places to go. Water from an upstairs line runs down inside walls and appears in a ground-floor room that had no plumbing in it, often weeks later.

We map where the water went before quoting the repair, which usually means pulling boards at a wall line rather than running a meter across a surface that has already dried.

What we do most here

Carpet and stairs. New hardwood in the newer stock. And floor repair, split between freeze damage and the ordinary consequences of a fifty-year-old subfloor.