Solid hardwood in Troy,
and the floor it has to meet

Species, cut, finish and how a nailed floor is put together belong on the solid hardwood pillar. This page stays on the intersection: what happens when real boards go into the houses standing in Troy. That is a stock of 5,183 units with a median build year of 2000, 81.1 percent of them detached, 33.2 percent finished in the 2000s, sitting on rising ground west of Highway 61 with limestone country immediately east.

In a Troy house, solid wood is rarely the first hard floor

In this stock something hard is usually already down before the wood question comes up: an entry, a kitchen, sometimes a hall. So a hardwood conversation in Troy almost never starts on bare framing. It starts with a floor that is staying and a floor that is arriving, and the whole job turns on how those two meet. That question is a height first and a color second, and taking the height early is what stops a job going sideways later.

It also changes the room you start in. Wood tends to move outward from the living space rather than being laid everywhere at once, so the first decision is usually how far the run goes before it has to stop against something the household is keeping.

What a deck laid around 2000 still has to be checked for

Solid wood is fastened into the structure rather than laid on top of it, so the structure is the first thing checked. Twenty five years of heating seasons, a settled beam or a poorly supported span will show as a dip that a straightedge finds in a minute and a photograph never will. In a Troy plan that matters, because the run usually moves outward from the living space toward a floor that is staying, and a dip anywhere along it shows up at the one joint the household looks at every day.

Limestone country, and the air underneath a Troy floor

Troy is not a river town. It sits in the south central part of Lincoln County, west of Highway 61 and southwest of the Cuivre, and the country immediately east of it is the Lincoln Hills, a glaciated limestone karst landscape of bluffs, glades, sinkholes, caves and springs. Ground that moves water through rock rather than across it is ground you do not make assumptions about, and this is a town that once lost its founding spring to a blast during sewer work.

None of that predicts what is happening under your particular house, and we will not pretend otherwise. What it does is settle procedure. The crawl space or the lower level gets a moisture reading with a meter before any species or board width is discussed, because solid wood answers to the humidity underneath it for as long as it is down.

The older houses under the courthouse hill ask a different question

The old part of Troy is noticeably hilly, with the courthouse end at the north higher than the south end near Marble and Cap au Gris Streets. A house built into that grade has usually been extended, and an addition brings its own framing, its own span and often its own floor height. Nailing a continuous wood floor across an original room and an added one is a real piece of work rather than a formality, and it is worth knowing before anybody talks about board width.

The quiet stretch before anyone nails anything

Solid boards have to reach the moisture content of the house they are going into before they are fastened down, and that is a scheduling problem, not a craft problem. At 18.6 road miles and about 26 minutes, with the approach off US 61 through the rebuilt Missouri Route 47 interchange, delivering material well ahead of the crew is straightforward. The boards come to Troy, they sit in the rooms they are going into with the house at its normal temperature, and nobody opens a nailer until they have stopped moving.

The sightline from a Troy entry decides the direction

In a plan from this building window the front door opens onto a sightline that runs through the living room and often straight to the back of the house. Board direction gets argued from the joists first, because a nailed floor wants to run across them, and from that sightline second. Where the two disagree there is a fix, but it is a decision made at the measure with the drawing in hand rather than on install morning with material already in the room.

69.9 percent owner occupied, in a town that moves within itself

Troy went from 12,683 residents at the 2020 census base to an estimated 14,963 in 2024, and 69.9 percent of its occupied homes are lived in by their owners. A growing town is one where households trade up without leaving, so a wood floor here often outlives the people who chose it. That is an argument for solid rather than against it. A nailed floor can be sanded and refinished rather than replaced, which means the surface can be reset for the next household without the structure being touched.

The rooms a Troy plan should not give to solid wood

We would rather rule rooms out at the measure than explain them afterwards. A finished lower level sitting against the ground is not a solid wood room, whatever the sample looks like. Nor is a laundry, and a bath is a conversation you should have with a different material. Where the honest answer is something else, the Troy alternatives are luxury vinyl plank and laminate, and upstairs the usual answer is still carpet in Troy.

Eight names on the rack, and the board that has to be seen whole

Portercraft, Paramount, Hartco, Jackson Hardwood, Casabella, Hudson Collection, Durango and National Flooring Products are the wood lines we work with. A chip tells you almost nothing about a floor, because grain, character and the way a finish handles low light only read across a full board laid down in the room it is going into. So full length boards get laid out at the showroom, and the finalists go home to Troy to be seen under your own windows. What moves the number up or down is set out on hardwood cost factors.

What the tape and the meter record in a Troy living room

• A moisture reading taken under the floor, not a guess made from the street
• A straightedge across the span, since a young deck is not automatically a flat one
• The finished height where new boards meet the hard floor that is staying
• Joist direction, and whether it fights the sightline from the front door
• Whether the room is original to the house or sits in an addition on a graded lot
• Door and casing clearance, and what has to be undercut before the first row