Hardwood floors in Port Angeles

Port Angeles built houses for a working town and floored them in what was coming out of the local mills: narrow Douglas fir strip, tight-ringed, hard-wearing, and cheap at the time. Then the sixties and seventies arrived and most of it disappeared under wall-to-wall. Pull that carpet up today and you have, very often, the nicest surface in the house.

What carpet leaves behind

Tack-strip nail holes in a band around the perimeter. Staple scars. A darker rectangle where a pad sat and a lighter margin where sun reached. Occasionally a patch of raw fir that was never finished because a rug always covered it. None of that is a problem — the perimeter band sands and fills, and the tonal difference mostly closes up once the whole floor takes finish evenly. We would rather see the floor before the carpet is hauled away, though, because the pad occasionally saved a finish good enough to simply recoat.

Slope, and the temptation to sand it flat

Older Port Angeles houses sit on steep grades and older foundations, and a good number of them have settled. A floor that reads a half-inch low at one wall is a framing condition, not a sanding condition. Sand a slope flat and you will take a quarter of the floor’s remaining life out of the high side to chase something nobody sees when the furniture is in. We sand to the plane of the floor, not the plane of a level, and we say so up front.

The wettest of our three towns

Twenty-five inches or more a year and a marine layer that sits for days. Crawlspaces here run damp, vapour barriers are patchy in the older stock, and summer cupping is the standard complaint. We meter under the floor as well as on it. Sometimes the honest first step is a ground barrier and a dry season, and the sand waits until autumn.

Lake cabins

Lake Sutherland and Lake Crescent bring a genuinely hard case: houses heated hard in August and left unheated from November, which is close to the worst annual cycle you can give a wood floor. We will install and refinish out there, and we will also tell you honestly what a seasonal building does to a solid floor before you spend the money.

Old-growth fir, again

Fir does not sand like oak — soft early wood, hard rings, a tendency to burnish and to drink stain unevenly. Everything on our refinishing page about a light cut and a coarser final grit applies double here, and it is why we would rather do this work than almost anything else.