Hardwood floors in Sequim

Sequim’s floors are younger than the rest of the peninsula’s, because most of Sequim’s houses are. Two decades of retirement and valley-floor building left a town full of single-level homes with prefinished oak and engineered floors laid between roughly 1995 and 2015. That stock is the reason we do more screen and recoat work here than anywhere else we go.

Winter gapping, and why not to fill it

The Olympic rain shadow puts Sequim at around seventeen inches of annual rainfall — a third of what Port Angeles gets an hour west. Add a heat pump running through January and indoor relative humidity can fall into the twenties. Boards shrink, gaps open, and every year somebody fills them.

Do not. A gap that opens in January closes in July, and filler that went in at the driest moment of the year gets crushed or pushed proud when the boards come back. The fix is humidity, not putty: hold the house between 35 and 55% and most Sequim gapping simply stops being visible. We take readings on every visit and put the numbers in writing.

Prefinished bevels

A lot of the 1990s and 2000s floors here are prefinished with a micro-bevel at every edge. Those bevels collect grit, and they cannot survive a full sanding — flatten the floor and the bevels go, which changes the look of the room whether you wanted that or not. It is a real decision and we walk through it before quoting rather than after. Often the honest answer is a recoat and another eight years.

Engineered floors

Engineered board with a thin wear layer — 2mm or less, which is most of what was installed in the boom — has one sanding in it at best, and some have none. We measure the wear layer at a floor register or a threshold before saying anything about sanding. When there is nothing to sand, a recoat is not a compromise; it is the whole available strategy, and done every five years it will outlast the roof.

The valley, which is a different town

Out past Carlsborg and up the Dungeness there are farmhouses, barn conversions and outbuildings turned living space — fir, reclaimed stock, and floors laid by whoever owned the property at the time. Those are our favourite calls, and they are proper refinishing work.

Single-level houses are easy on everyone

No stairs means faster staging, cleaner containment and, for a recoat, genuinely one day. We batch Sequim recoats into single weeks; if your timing is flexible the lead time is usually short.