How to decide about a floor in a region this old

Sanding & Refinishing

• Pillar GuideRefinishing a floor in an old Philadelphia houseWhat decides whether your floor can be sanded, and why the answer here is different from the answer in a newer suburb.
• Code ExplainerThe lead rule decides how your sander is builtIn a region that is 60.5 percent pre-1978, this is not an edge case. It is the default condition of the work.

Stairs & Railings

• Pillar GuideWhat is under your stair carpetAlmost everyone lifts a corner, sees wood, and concludes there is a hardwood staircase under there. Usually there is not.

Flooring Materials

• Decision GuideSolid or engineered, and why the basement decidesThe choice is presented as taste. It is usually settled by what is under the room, before anyone gets to taste.

Repair & Restoration

• Code ExplainerWhy your floor gaps in winterSeasonal gaps are the floor working normally. Knowing which gaps are not is what keeps you from paying to fix nothing.

Floor Installation

• ComparisonPrefinished or site-finishedYou will be told the difference is dust and drying time. The difference that lasts is the bevel and whether the floor can ever be matched.

How this gets written

Every article here has to add something the rest of the internet does not, and the thing we can add is our own housing data.

Our own numbers, published

The housing figures in these articles come from the dataset we built and published at /data/, from the American Community Survey 2023 five year estimates. It is free to download and free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. If a number appears in an article, you can check it against the source.

Code cited by section, not paraphrased

Where an article says the code requires something, it names the section. Philadelphia adopts the 2021 International Residential Code, and Pennsylvania amends it. A number copied from a national article can be wrong here, and we would rather cite than summarise.

Written by the crew that does the work

Nobody here is a staff writer. These are the answers we give at estimates, written down. That is also why some of them say a job is not worth doing, or that waiting is the right move.

Updated, not republished

When the Census releases a new five year estimate or a code edition is adopted, the existing article gets updated and the change is stamped. We do not republish the same piece under a new headline.