Solid Hardwood Floor Installation in Dunlap, Philadelphia

Installing solid hardwood in an old house

In Dunlap a new solid floor almost always has to meet an old one, so the job is as much about matching and leveling as it is about nailing boards.

Original floors here are narrow strip, often laid straight over the joists, and the house has moved for a century. New boards have to match the width and species of what is staying, and the framing has to be checked for level and for bounce before anything goes on top of it.

Where a new floor joins an old one, the boards are woven together across the joint instead of ending in a straight line at the doorway. Done that way, and finished together, the two floors read as one.

How the housing in Dunlap compares

Of the 2,584 housing units in Dunlap, roughly 1,900 were built before 1940 and approximately 2,400 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, Dunlap ranks 4th 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

Housing this old normally holds narrow strip oak laid straight over joists, and often it has only one sanding left.

In a place where a large share of the housing predates 1940, the floor under the carpet is usually the original one. That means narrow strip oak, sometimes heart pine on upper floors, nailed straight to the joists with no plywood in between. It also means the floor has probably been sanded before, possibly more than once.

Only the wood above the tongue can be sanded, roughly a quarter inch on a traditional floor. A floor that has already given up two of those sandings is a different job from one that has given up none, and the difference is not visible from standing height. We measure at the edge of a board before quoting.

The federal lead rule applies to most of the housing here

Approximately 94.3% 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.