Do you serve St. Charles city?

Yes, and all three standard city ZIP codes are on the map, 63301, 63303 and 63304. Saint Charles holds two housing stocks a few miles apart, which the Saint Charles page sets out along with the historic district question. This page is about the decision the older half of that city actually presents. Pull the carpet back in a Frenchtown or South Main house and there is often wood under it. Now you have a choice to make, and it is not the one most people arrive with.

Three roads out of the same room

The American Community Survey puts 6.8% of housing units in the city at 1939 or earlier, and a house from that end of the range has usually had at least one floor put over the original one. So the room offers three ways forward, not two.

• Keep what is there. Restoring an existing wood floor is its own trade, separate from selling and installing a new one, and it is worth knowing whether it is even possible before you commit to anything else.
• Cover it. The old floor stays put and becomes the surface a new floor sits on, which raises every finished height in the room. Whether that works depends almost entirely on what is underneath.
• Take it up and start from the subfloor. The most work, the fewest surprises afterward, and the only option that lets you change the plank direction and the room heights freely.

What decides whether the old wood can stay

Wood only has so many lives in it. A solid strip floor is sanded from the surface down, and the usable material is the wood sitting above the tongue. Once a sander has taken that away the fasteners are close to the surface and the floor is finished as a floor. How many rounds a floor has left is a question with its own page, and in an old house the honest starting point is that you do not know yet.

Three things push the answer around, and all three are visible without tools. How the boards are fastened, since face nails driven through the top of the board tell a different story from a blind nailed tongue. Whether previous sandings have already dished the boards between the nails or opened gaps at the ends. And whether the floor is flat enough to sand at all, because a floor that dips through the middle of a room is a framing question before it is a finish question.

When starting over is the straighter answer

Old floors get patched. A wall came out, a chimney was removed, a bathroom was added, and each of those left a strip of newer wood running the wrong way through the room. Patchwork can be beautiful, and it can also be the thing you look at for the next twenty years. Nothing about a sander fixes it.

Water history matters too. A floor that has been wet has usually cupped, and cupping that has been sanded flat while the boards were still damp comes back the other way once the house dries out. That is worth knowing before you pay anyone to sand anything. Room use is the third one. If the plan is a mud room, a laundry or anything in the basement, the wood was never the right material for that room and saving it is saving the wrong thing.

Covering it, and what it takes in height

Leaving the old floor down and building on top of it is the quickest of the three, and it is the one that comes back to bite people in an old house. Every finished height in the room moves up together. The bottom of the door. The first stair riser, which is now shorter than the others by exactly the thickness you added. The threshold into the bath. The line where the floor meets a register or a hearth. Doors have their own answer page, and a stair riser does not, because a stair riser has to be dealt with before you commit rather than afterward.

What to look at this week, before anyone comes out

• Lift one floor register. The cut through the floor at the duct is a free cross section: you can see the finish layer, the board thickness, whatever is beneath it and how many layers there are.
• Pull the carpet back inside a closet. It is the one place where the original floor was never walked on, so it shows you the color and the finish before decades of traffic got to it.
• Look along the boards at a low angle from a doorway with the light behind you. Dips, cups and old sanding waves show up in that view and disappear in every other one.
• Photograph all of it in daylight, and photograph the room too. Trim height, stair placement and where each door swings are the details that decide what covering the floor would do to the room.

Bring those photographs to the showroom and the shortlist narrows fast. The measure is where the room gets read properly, and it is also where the rest of the four county map gets the same treatment, whether the address is here or over in <a href="/answers/do-you-serve-o-fallon/">O'Fallon</a> or St. Peters. Give a street address when you book, since 63302 is a P.O. Box code and will not find a house. Call 636-332-0654.