Hardwood Refinishing near you

Ask for the sequence in writing before anyone rents a machine. Refinishing is one of the few trades where you can see the quality of the preparation through the finish for the next twenty years, and where the steps that get skipped are invisible on the day the invoice arrives.

This is the credential that matters most in American refinishing, and it is federal rather than state. EPA states that in general anyone who is paid to perform work that disturbs paint in housing and child-occupied facilities built before 1978 must be certified, and it maintains a searchable database so you can locate lead-safe certified firms near you, plus the National Lead Information Center at 1-800-424-LEAD if you would rather ask a person. Certification covers the firm; the people on site are either certified renovators or trained on the job by one.

The rule has a narrow exit and homeowners regularly assume it is wider than it is. EPA excludes minor repair and maintenance activities that disturb six square feet or less of paint per room inside, or 20 square feet or less on the exterior, and says a project under those limits is not considered a renovation under the rule. Three qualifications kill most floor jobs anyway. Activities in the same room within a 30-day period count as the same job, so a room done over three days adds up. Window replacement and demolition of painted surfaces are always covered regardless of square footage. And the exemption disappears the moment a prohibited practice is used, which includes machines that remove coatings through high speed operation such as sanding or grinding unless they have shrouds or containment systems and a HEPA vacuum attachment. A floor sander is exactly that kind of machine.

So the practical questions are short. Was this house built before 1978? Is any painted surface being disturbed, including the shoe molding, the baseboard, a painted stair riser or a painted border on the floor itself? If the answer to both is yes, ask for the firm's EPA certification number and check it, and expect containment, HEPA dust collection and a cleaning verification at the end rather than a shop vacuum and a broom.

Floor finishing has a body count, and it is recent enough to be worth knowing. NIOSH records that in 2004 and 2005 the Massachusetts Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation program, which it funds, investigated two incidents in which a total of three floor finishing workers died when the flammable lacquer sealer they were using caught fire. The products involved had flash points below 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and in July 2010 the Massachusetts governor signed a state law banning the sale and commercial use of highly flammable lacquer sealers with flash points below that mark. Most states have no such ban, so the question of what is being applied in your house is yours to ask.

The ignition source is usually already in the room. A pilot light on a water heater, a range or a dryer, a refrigerator compressor cycling, or a switch being flipped is enough when solvent vapor is pooling at floor level. Ask the crew what they will shut off and how long the house stays empty, and treat an answer of we always do this as the wrong one.

Then there are the rags. The US Fire Administration reports that an average of 1,700 home fires per year are caused by instances of spontaneous combustion or chemical reaction, and oil-finish rags left in a pile are a classic way to join that statistic. Settle before work starts where used rags go, and do not let a bag of them sit in the garage overnight.

The trade argument is about color, hardness and dry time. Oil-modified polyurethane ambers as it ages and warms the wood, goes on in fewer coats and takes far longer between them. Waterborne finishes stay closer to the raw color of the wood, dry fast enough that a crew can build several coats in a day, and have improved enormously in durability. Neither is automatically the right answer for a busy hallway with two dogs in it.

The health side is more straightforward. EPA notes that water-based paints emit fewer chemical vapors than oil-based products, and its indoor air guidance is blunt about the scale of the exposure: concentrations of many volatile organic compounds are consistently higher indoors, up to ten times higher, than outdoors, and during and for several hours after activities such as paint stripping, levels may be 1,000 times background outdoor levels. The listed effects run from eye, nose and throat irritation to headaches, loss of coordination and nausea.

Ventilation is what actually reduces the dose, and EPA is specific about how much. Its remodeling guidance is to operate fans and provide as much ventilation as possible continuously, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, from the beginning of the work until two or three days after it is finished, and to block heating or air-conditioning return openings so air from the work area is not circulated through the rest of the house. It also suggests scheduling interior painting when the home is unoccupied where that is feasible. A refinishing schedule that has you sleeping upstairs on night one is worth renegotiating.

A full sand is not the only option and it is not always the cheapest way to a floor you like. Where the finish is worn but the wood underneath is not stained, scratched through or cupped, a screen and recoat abrades the existing surface and adds a fresh coat without removing wood. It cannot fix color, deep scratches or pet damage, and it fails badly if the old floor has ever been waxed or treated with an acrylic polish, so the crew should test a patch first.

A full sand is the answer when the damage is in the wood rather than on it, and it is a finite resource. Every sanding removes thickness, and the limit is the tongue: once the boards have been taken close to the fasteners, the floor is done. Old growth strip floors in pre-war houses have often been sanded two or three times already, which is why an honest assessment starts with pulling a vent or a threshold to look at a board edge rather than with a price.

Replacement earns its place where boards are rotted, fire damaged, water stained through their thickness, or missing in a patch that cannot be woven in convincingly. Weaving new boards into an old floor and then sanding the whole room is usually a better result than a visible patch, and it is worth asking for that comparison rather than accepting a full replacement quote first.

Two refinishing bids usually differ because the crews are proposing different amounts of preparation, not different cans. The variables that move an American quote most are the measured floor area and how cut up it is with closets, bays and built-ins, the species and how much wood is left above the tongue, whether shoe molding is removed and reinstalled, whether the house is pre-1978 and therefore needs a lead-safe certified firm with containment and HEPA collection, whether stairs are included, how many finish coats are quoted and whether a stain and water-popping step is in the scope, and how the furniture and the occupants are handled while the finish cures. Ask each company for the coat count and the cure schedule in writing and the bids become comparable.

LokalMatch is where the search starts. You describe the floor once: roughly how many square feet, the age of the house, the species if you know it, what the damage looks like and whether you want a color change. Refinishing companies covering your area receive that request and the interested ones contact you directly. Pros pay for the requests they receive, and homeowners use the service free. LokalMatch does not sand or finish floors, does not set or negotiate prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend any company, so checking the EPA lead-safe certification where the house predates 1978, confirming insurance and reading the written scope stays with you.