Solid Hardwood For
Augusta Houses On
The River Bluffs

Every material has one question it asks before any other, and for solid hardwood the question is what it will be fastened to. Augusta answers that differently from a subdivision: 166 housing units, a median build year of 1938, and 53.6% of the stock built in 1939 or earlier. This page is about solid wood meeting that framing. Species, cut and finish belong to the solid hardwood pillar, and the Town itself to the Augusta page. Call 636-332-0654.

A nailed floor is only as good as the framing under it

Solid hardwood goes down mechanically, which means it needs something it can be mechanically fixed to, running the right way relative to the boards. Housing from the 1930s and earlier was framed to the standards and the lumber of its own day, and it has usually had a lifetime of loads, repairs and small alterations since. Joist direction can change between an original room and a later one. Deflection between the middle of a span and the wall is something you can feel through your feet before any instrument reads it. None of that rules out a solid floor, and in this stock it very often points at one, but it does mean the framing gets looked at rather than assumed.

That look happens at the in-home measure, not over the phone. It is the difference between a quote that survives contact with the house and a quote that changes on the second morning.

There may already be a wood floor down, and it may be worth keeping

In a stock this old the honest first question is sometimes whether you need new wood at all. Houses of this age were frequently floored in solid boards to begin with, and in plenty of them those boards are still there under something newer. Sometimes what is underneath has decades left in it. Sometimes it was cut into for plumbing forty years ago, patched twice and is past saving. You cannot tell from the top and you certainly cannot tell from a photo, so we look while we are in the house and tell you what we find, including when the answer is that you already own a floor.

Detached on all four sides, and what that does to footfall

93.4% of Augusta's housing is single-unit detached. There is no neighbor below you and no shared wall, so the one sound argument people usually raise against a hard floor, that somebody else has to listen to it, simply does not apply here. What is left is your own house, and a solid floor in an older plan with real doorways carries sound quite differently from one running unbroken through an open main level. This is a stock where a hard floor and a quiet house are not in conflict, which is worth knowing before anyone talks you out of the material.

Bluff siting, and what the air under the floor is doing

Augusta sits on bluffs of dolomite and sandstone above the Missouri River valley, and its houses sit on top of the bluff rather than out on the bottomland. Several of them were built with deep basements dug as wine cellars, and a cellar cut to hold a steady cool is not a conditioned modern basement. Wood is sensitive to what the air below it is doing, all year, so the space beneath the floor gets checked here as a matter of course: what is down there, how it is ventilated, and what the floor above it has been living with. That check costs an extra ten minutes of the visit and it changes the recommendation more often than anything else on the list.

A living room with walls around it, not an open plan

The National Park Service documents Augusta's building stock as Missouri German vernacular, austere and symmetrical, with sparse detailing. In practice that means defined rooms and real doorways, and a living room in a house like that is a room you floor as a room. A solid floor does not have to run continuously to the far side of the house to look intentional. It also means you can put wood where wood belongs and let a doorway do the work, with carpet in Augusta handling the bedrooms if that is how the house wants to be used.

Hardwood lines worth seeing under one light before you drive back

We show Portercraft, Paramount, Hartco, Jackson Hardwood, Casabella, Hudson Collection, Durango and National Flooring Products. Wood is the material people most often choose from a small photograph and then live with for thirty years, which is a bad trade. Put boards from two or three of those lines side by side in the showroom, take the shortlist home to the room, and look at it against your own trim and your own light. What moves the number is set out on hardwood cost factors.

24.5 miles south means the install is booked as a block

Augusta is 24.5 road miles and about 36 minutes from our door. A solid hardwood job is not a single afternoon anywhere, and at that distance the sensible thing is to plan the whole sequence up front rather than improvising a return trip: material on site when it should be, the rooms cleared in the right order, and the days blocked together instead of scattered. Most of the friction in a hardwood install is scheduling friction, and it is much easier to remove from a calendar than from a half-finished floor.

What gets written down in an Augusta living room

Room dimensions, joist direction where we can see it, the height the finished floor will sit at and what that does at every exterior door and every threshold, the condition of whatever is down now, and what the space under the floor looks like. That page of notes is the quote. It is free, it happens at your address, and it is the reason a hardwood number from us tends to stay the number.