Solid Hardwood Floor Installation in Crescentville, Philadelphia

Adding solid hardwood to a postwar house

Most houses in Crescentville have the wood subfloor that solid hardwood needs, and the usual job is extending oak into rooms that never had it.

Postwar builders often laid oak in the living room and bedrooms and left the kitchen, and sometimes a later family room, with plywood meant for carpet or sheet flooring. Adding solid hardwood there means matching the two and a quarter inch red oak that is already in the house.

That match is easy to get right in this stock, because the board is still a standard one. New wood is laced into the old at the doorway and the whole floor is sanded and finished together, which is the only way the color comes out even.

How the housing in Crescentville compares

Of the 3,208 housing units in Crescentville, roughly 490 were built before 1940 and approximately 2,900 before 1978.

That makes the housing here older than the 132 Philadelphia neighborhoods in our data taken together, where approximately 82.8% of 733,961 units predate 1978, and above the 60.5% figure for our whole service area. By the share built before 1940, Crescentville ranks 103rd of those 132. The full table is published as open housing data.

Within Philadelphia, the oldest housing in our data is in Cedar Park, with a median year of 1925, and the newest is in Kensington, Old, at 1997.

For a new solid floor, the median year is the useful figure. It tells you whether the house is likely to have the wood subfloor that solid hardwood needs, or a slab where it does not belong.

What is usually under the floor here

Two and a quarter inch red oak nailed over a wood subfloor, which is the case that refinishes best.

Postwar housing in this region was built with a plywood or board subfloor and solid red oak strip on top, most commonly two and a quarter inches wide. It is the standard floor of the American postwar house and it is the easiest thing we work on: predictable thickness, predictable fastening, predictable result.

The question in this stock is more often the subfloor than the wood on top of it. Squeaks, deflection and movement come from below, and sanding a floor that moves gives you a smooth floor that still moves.

The federal lead rule applies to most of the housing here

Approximately 89.9% of the homes here were built before 1978, which is the line the EPA rule draws.

Paid work that disturbs painted surfaces in pre-1978 housing falls under 40 CFR Part 745, and floor sanding reaches painted surfaces more often than people expect: the edger runs to the baseboard, the shoe molding and the door casing, and in older housing those carry many layers.

The part that matters for the equipment is 745.85(a)(3), which prohibits high speed machines that strip a coating on painted surfaces unless they carry containment and a HEPA vacuum collecting dust at the point of generation. That is a description of how the sander has to be assembled, not a suggestion about tidiness.