Solid hardwood in Chesterfield
Starting with what is already under there

Solid hardwood in Chesterfield is unusual among flooring decisions because the first question is not what to buy. It is what is already down. 31.9 percent of the city's 21,603 housing units were built in the 1970s and another 11.1 percent in the 1960s, and in housing of that age a carpeted living room quite often has a wood floor underneath that nobody has looked at in twenty years. Whether that floor is worth keeping is a real question with a real answer, and it is answered by lifting a corner rather than by guessing.

Lifting a corner in a Chesterfield living room

What is found under the carpet in this stock varies more than people expect. Sometimes it is a full wood floor in decent shape with a border of tack holes around the perimeter. Sometimes it is wood only in the rooms that were meant to show, with a plywood underlayment everywhere else. Sometimes it is a thin strip product that has already been sanded once and has very little left. All three look the same until the carpet comes up in one corner, and all three lead to different recommendations. We record what we find rather than assuming a house of a given age has a given floor.

Each of the three leads somewhere different, which is why it is worth establishing before the shopping starts. A sound full floor turns the project into a sanding and finishing question, where the color you are after is reached without buying a plank at all. Wood in the show rooms only turns it into a boundary question, because the underlayment in the rooms next door has to arrive at the same finished height as whatever goes over it. A strip that has already been sanded once turns it into a removal, and then the height of the stack coming out is what the new floor has to be measured against.

None of this is a promise about your house. It is the reason the measure matters more here than it does in a subdivision built in the last five years, where what is under the carpet is known before anyone drives out.

Nailing into a floor system nobody has opened since it was built

Solid plank is fastened into a wood subfloor, so the subfloor is the product's real foundation. In housing framed in the 1960s and 1970s the sheathing under the finished floor is not always what a modern installation would want, and joist spacing and deflection vary with how the house was built. That is not a reason to avoid solid wood. It is the reason a solid wood quote should follow a look at the subfloor rather than precede it, and the reason a fastening schedule is a decision rather than a default.

The Chesterfield rooms that sit on a slab

Solid wood wants a wood subfloor above the outside grade with the humidity beneath it controlled, and a room sitting on concrete offers neither. Where a Chesterfield room falls on that side of the line the answer is a different construction rather than a thinner plank, and engineered hardwood in Chesterfield covers what that means.

The Chesterfield doors that were hung to a different floor thickness

Why finished floor heights in this stock already step between rooms is set out on the Chesterfield page. What a solid plank does to that history is arithmetic, and it is arithmetic done doorway by doorway. Three quarters of an inch of nailed oak, plus any plywood layer put down to flatten the deck beneath it, is a stack of a fixed height, and it is replacing a carpet and cushion stack of a different one. The finished floor may land above or below where the old surface sat. Either way, what is left over is the gap under a door that was hung to the thickness the house was built with, and a door has only so much of that to give. Doors can be eased and thresholds can be made to work, and both are easier when the height is taken at the measure than when it is discovered on install week.

The arithmetic also changes with the door itself. A hinged door can come off and be eased along its bottom edge, and there is usually enough in it to allow that once. A bifold hangs from a track that was set to the floor the house came with, so it has less to give. A pocket door has least of all, because its head height was fixed when the wall was framed and nothing about it moves afterwards. So the heights get taken opening by opening, with the doors named, rather than taken once in the hall and applied to the rest of the house.

Wood comes into balance with the house before it is fastened

How wood behaves in Missouri air, and why it has to come into balance with a house before a single board is fastened, is set out on the hardwood page, and the delivery here is planned backwards from the installation date so that settling happens on the calendar rather than in the last two days before the crew arrives.

Where a Chesterfield plan changed and the framing changed with it

Board direction is a one time decision, and the complication in this stock is that the house does not always give one answer. Rooms were added to these plans over the decades and the framing direction changed where they were, so the joists under a family room can run at right angles to the joists under the room it opens off. Where a plan strings several spaces together through cased openings rather than doors, the wood should carry through them as one floor, which means a single direction has to satisfy framing that disagrees with itself. That is what an added layer over the deck is for, and whether one is needed gets worked out on paper at the measure rather than with material already in the house.

What to carry to Wentzville from a plan that disagrees with itself

Portercraft, Paramount, Hartco, Jackson Hardwood, Casabella, Hudson Collection, Durango and National Flooring Products are the lines on the racks in Wentzville. What makes the run in from Chesterfield worth more than a browse is arriving with the house written down: the room dimensions, the direction the joists run under each space, and where the openings between those spaces sit. With that on the table one board direction can be tested against framing that does not agree with itself, and a width can be weighed against the run it would have to make in your rooms rather than against the length of a display rack.

When to leave the living room alone and start elsewhere

If the existing wood is sound and the reason for changing is color rather than condition, that is worth knowing before a quote for new material is written. And if quiet is the actual goal, particularly in a room over another household, a solid plank is working against you and carpet in Chesterfield is the more honest recommendation. We would rather tell you that at the measure than at the end.