The short version
- Main Line housing gets younger as you go west: about 65.4 percent of Narberth homes predate 1940, against 8.4 percent in Tredyffrin Township.
- Prewar floors have usually been sanded before, so the first question is how much wood is left above the tongue.
- Postwar strip oak in towns like Wayne and Devon often spent decades under carpet, which tends to leave plenty of floor to sand.
- In most Main Line towns a large share of homes predate 1978, so the lead rules for sanding coated surfaces are the default assumption until a test says otherwise.
- The town-level figures come from our own dataset of the region's housing, published at /data/.
The Main Line is not one housing stock
Going west along the rail line, the median house gets decades younger, and the share of homes built before 1940 drops from more than half to under a tenth.
The table below comes from our dataset of the region's housing, built from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey and published at /data/. It covers the towns and townships people usually mean when they say the Main Line, plus Haverford Township next door.
Read it as a gradient. Narberth and Merion Station are prewar places: the median home there is from 1939 or earlier, which is as far back as the survey reports. Ardmore, Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Devon cluster around the 1940s and early 1950s. Wayne, Radnor, Berwyn and Villanova sit around 1960. Tredyffrin Township, with a median of 1973, is the youngest of the group.
Some rows overlap. Townships contain villages, so Wayne sits partly inside Radnor and Devon inside Tredyffrin. The township number describes the whole township; the village number describes the village. A single street can still be older or younger than its town, which is why the figure is a starting point and the floor itself is the answer.
| Place | Homes | Median year built | Built before 1978 | Built before 1940 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Narberth | 2,003 | 1939 or earlier | 90.1% | 65.4% |
| Merion Station | 1,952 | 1939 or earlier | 92.7% | 56.0% |
| Ardmore | 6,632 | 1942 | 85.2% | 47.5% |
| Bryn Mawr | 2,200 | 1952 | 82.1% | 37.4% |
| Lower Merion Township | 25,305 | 1954 | 80.0% | 32.2% |
| Haverford Township | 18,672 | 1951 | 89.0% | 31.6% |
| Devon | 593 | 1951 | 82.1% | 27.8% |
| Wayne | 2,787 | 1959 | 73.0% | 23.3% |
| Radnor Township | 10,389 | 1964 | 73.2% | 18.7% |
| Berwyn | 1,515 | 1962 | 68.8% | 15.2% |
| Villanova | 887 | 1963 | 69.4% | 11.8% |
| Tredyffrin Township | 12,935 | 1973 | 57.3% | 8.4% |
The shares are estimates from a survey, not a count of every house. They tell you what is likely on your street, and the floor itself confirms it.
Prewar towns: how much floor is left
In Narberth, Merion Station and Ardmore the floor has usually been sanded at least once already, so the job starts by measuring the wood that remains above the tongue.
A solid strip floor can only be sanded down to the top of its tongue. Below that the nails show and the boards start to split along the edges. A floor laid in the 1920s or 1930s has had close to a century to collect refinishing jobs, and each one took a little off the top.
The measurement is simple and it is the first thing we do. Pull a floor register, or look at a board end at a threshold, and you can see the profile of the board and how much wood sits above the tongue. That number, not the look of the surface, decides whether a full sanding is right or whether a lighter approach serves the floor better.
Prewar floors also carry their history on the surface: patches where a radiator stood, a strip of different wood where a wall was moved, borders around the edge of a dining room. None of that stops a refinish. It changes how the sanding is done, because a border runs across the grain of the field and cannot be sanded in one direction with the rest of the room.
If a previous sanding exposed nail heads along the boards, that is the floor telling you how much is left. Mention it when you call; it changes the plan.
Postwar towns: the floor that spent decades under carpet
In Wayne, Devon, Bryn Mawr and Radnor the typical floor is narrow oak strip, and much of it was covered with wall to wall carpet for years, which tends to leave plenty of wood to sand.
Houses built in the 1940s through the 1960s were usually floored in oak strip, often red oak, about two and a quarter inches wide. It is a durable, forgiving floor. Then, from the 1960s on, a great many of them were carpeted wall to wall.
Carpet is hard on the look of a floor and easy on its thickness. Under it you tend to find tack strip nailed around the perimeter, staples every few inches where the pad was held down, and a finish that has yellowed but has not been walked through. The wood underneath has often never been sanded, or sanded once.
The work before the sander is the tedious part: every staple out, every tack strip hole filled or left as character, the low spots where the carpet seams were. Owners are sometimes surprised that the floor they find is in better condition than the one in the rooms that were never covered.
The younger end of the line
In Tredyffrin and the newer streets around Villanova and Berwyn, the floor may be solid oak, engineered or prefinished, and which one decides whether and how it can be refinished.
By the 1970s and later, builders had more options. A house from that period, or a later addition to an older house, may have solid site finished oak like its neighbors, solid prefinished boards with a small bevel at every edge, or an engineered floor with a wood layer bonded to a plywood core.
Engineered floors can be sanded, but how many times depends entirely on the thickness of that top layer, and some can only take a light screening. Prefinished floors lose their bevels when they are sanded flat, which changes how the floor looks. Both are worth identifying before anyone quotes a full sanding.
A board pulled at a register or a look at the edge of a stair landing usually answers it. If the house has had an addition, check both parts: the original rooms and the addition are often different floors that happen to meet at a doorway.
Lead and the 1978 line
In most of these towns a majority of homes predate 1978, so a sanding job is planned around the federal lead rules for coated surfaces unless a test shows no lead.
The federal renovation rule applies to work that disturbs paint and other surface coatings in homes built before 1978. Floor finishes and the painted trim around a floor are both coatings. In Devon about 82.1 percent of homes predate 1978 by our dataset, in Ardmore about 85.2 percent, and even in Tredyffrin Township it is about 57.3 percent.
In practice that means containment around the work area, dust collection at the machine, and cleaning and verification at the end, unless testing shows the coatings are free of lead. Our article on the lead rule and the floor sander goes through what that looks like day to day.
It is also a reason to ask any contractor how they handle it. The answer should be specific: what gets sealed off, what the sander is connected to and how the room is checked before you walk back in.
Large houses and floors that run room to room
Where one floor runs continuously through a hall and several rooms, the refinish has to stop at a natural break or include the whole run, because half a floor cannot be made to match the other half.
Many Main Line houses have a center hall with the living and dining rooms opening off it, and the same strip floor running through all of it without a threshold. Refinishing the living room alone leaves a visible line where the new finish stops, usually across an open doorway.
The practical answer is to find the breaks the house already has: a doorway with a saddle, a change of direction in the boards, a stair. The job is drawn to those lines, or it covers the whole connected floor. A good estimate shows those lines on a sketch so there is no surprise about where the new finish ends.
Stairs and landings belong in the same conversation. A landing is usually part of the upstairs floor, and a stair that meets a freshly refinished hall in a different color reads as unfinished. They do not have to be done together, but the color and sheen should be decided together.
Matching new wood into an old floor
Where a kitchen, an addition or a removed wall leaves a gap, new boards are woven into the old floor and the whole area is sanded and finished together so it reads as one surface.
The trick is that old oak and new oak are not the same color. Wood darkens and ambers with age and light, and a new board laid next to a 70 year old one stands out even after both are sanded. Species and width have to match first; color is brought together with the sanding and, where needed, with stain.
Weaving means removing boards in a staggered pattern so the new wood interlocks with the old rather than meeting it in a straight seam. A straight seam across a room is the most visible repair there is. A woven one disappears once the floor is finished.
This is one of the strongest reasons to site finish rather than lay prefinished boards in an old house: only a floor sanded and coated in place can be blended into what is already there.
What helps before the estimate
Knowing which rooms, what is on the floor now and when it was last refinished lets the estimate be specific on the first visit.
Make a list of the rooms and hallways you want done and note where the floor continues past them. If there is carpet, lift a corner in a closet and take a photo of what is underneath. If you know when the floor was last refinished, or that it never was, that helps too.
Photos of any damage, pet stains or patched areas are useful, and so is the year the house was built if you know it. Mention whether there are stairs or landings that meet the floor and whether you are thinking about a color change.
None of this replaces looking at the floor. It does mean the conversation at the house can be about choices, not discovery.
Refinishing pages for Main Line towns
Each town has its own page with its housing figures and what refinishing involves there.
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Narberth, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Merion Station, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Ardmore, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Bryn Mawr, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Lower Merion, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Haverford, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Devon, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Wayne, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Radnor, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Berwyn, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Villanova, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Rosemont, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Paoli, PA
- Hardwood Floor Refinishing in Tredyffrin, PA
