Lakeville Wood Flooring has been installing, sanding and finishing wood flooring for more than twenty years, and wood flooring in Edina raises one question before any other: what kind of building does the floor live in? That answer decides more about the quote than the species, the width or the finish ever will. A house with its own furnace and its own lower level, and a unit on an upper floor of a managed building, are two separate jobs wearing the same trade name.
We come out to measure rather than to sell. On that first visit we take a relative humidity reading inside the house, write it on the quote, and print the 30 to 50 percent band wood flooring is specified for beside it, so the number that governs the floor is on paper before anyone orders a board. The moisture content of the flooring and of the subfloor get measured against each other the same way, and both numbers are recorded.
Edina splits more cleanly than most suburbs do, and the split runs straight through how a wood floor gets installed, sanded and finished here. What follows is how that plays out on both sides of it.
The missing middle in Edina’s housing stock
Across the city’s 24,071 housing units, attached townhome, twinhome and rowhome structures account for 5.2 percent of the stock. That is the middle rung most suburbs lean on, and here it is closer to a rounding error than a category. What sits on either side of it is where nearly all of the floor work happens.
On the ownership side, 73.7 percent of owner-occupied households are in one-unit detached houses, against 4.8 percent in attached structures. On the rental side, 81.6 percent of renter-occupied households are in buildings of ten or more units. Neither number describes any particular address — they describe how the stock is distributed — but together they explain why the calls we take here arrive in two shapes and almost never a third.
Two shapes of phone call
One call is an owner with a whole house: a main level of oak, stairs, a hallway tying three bedrooms together, and a lower level that may or may not sit over a slab. The other is a unit — owned or rented, occupied or empty — inside a building with a manager, a service elevator, a loading dock, and a date by which the corridor has to be clear again.
We quote those differently on purpose. The house is one continuous floor governed by one indoor climate; the unit is a bounded rectangle governed by a building. Treating either like the other is how a job goes wrong before the first board is down.
The five percent in between
The attached homes that do exist here — roughly one unit in twenty across the stock — borrow from both sides and match neither. There is often an association with an opinion about work hours and a party wall carrying sound between two owners, alongside a slab-on-grade lower level and a private entry no large building would have. We quote those on their own terms rather than defaulting to whichever side of the city we worked on last.
Looking for wood-flooring closer to Lonsdale? See Wood-Flooring Services in Lonsdale.
The detached side: one owner, one house, one continuous floor
In a detached house the floor is a single system, and it moves as one. A run that leaves an entry, crosses a kitchen and ends at a back door shares its air, its heat and its humidity with every room it touches, so the boards behave as one assembly rather than as separate rooms. That is why we read the house before we read the plan.
Grade is measured, not assumed
We establish grade the way the installation guidelines define it: soil sitting within three inches of a floor puts that level below grade, whatever the listing calls it. A walkout or a lookout is quoted as what it actually is, because the answer changes the material, the vapor retarder and sometimes the recommendation itself. Lower-level work is quoted from a moisture reading taken on the lower-level slab, never inferred from the floor above it.
Where a slab is involved we test it rather than estimate it, and an in-situ relative humidity test reads what the concrete is actually holding. Radon-resistant construction under a slab is something we want to know about before anyone starts fastening or troweling adhesive. A sub-slab membrane or a passive soil-gas system is not an obstacle, but it is not something to find with a nailer in hand either.
The winter a floor here has to survive
We explain the winter conflict before the work is booked rather than after the gaps appear. In a deep cold snap, the relative humidity a house can safely hold sits below the bottom of the floor’s own specification, and the floor answers with seasonal gapping whether or not anyone said so first. Boards that close back up in July were never defective; they were doing what wood does.
Board width is chosen against the species’ own dimensional change coefficient, and the seasonal movement to expect at that width is stated in writing before anything is ordered. A wide plank and a strip floor in the same white oak are two different exposure levels to the same winter. Cupping, dry cupping and crowning all begin as moisture stories, so we would rather put the numbers on a quote than explain them in February.
When a water loss decides where the floor stops
On an insurance job the hard question is rarely the wet room; it is where the floor run ends. We raise that with the adjuster in writing before any tear-out, because a continuous run carrying on through a hallway into two more rooms is a different scope than a bathroom’s worth of boards. A weave-in across an old threshold can work, and it can also read as a repair forever — that is a decision to make on paper rather than mid-tear-out.
The building side: a unit, a manager and a handover date
A unit inside a building of ten or more units is a different job from the first phone call onward. There is a manager or an association with rules about work hours, elevator reservations, corridor protection and the date the unit has to be back in service. The floor is smaller and the scheduling is harder, and a quote has to reflect the second half as honestly as the first.
Work planned for a place that cannot open its windows
Dust containment, cure times and ventilation are planned for a unit whose windows may not open at all. We run dustless containment with HEPA vacuum collection, because the alternative is a corridor and somebody’s front door, and we give return-to-service times in writing so a handover date rests on something. A waterborne polyurethane and an oil-modified polyurethane do not share a cure schedule, and that choice belongs to the calendar as much as to the look.
Unit turns are where a realistic schedule earns its keep. Property rented out in Edina carries an annual city rental license, and single-family homes, condominiums and townhome rentals are inspected every other year, so an owner arriving with a fixed date usually has a reason for it. We would rather size the grit sequence and the number of coats against that date up front than find the mismatch on the last coat.
Engineered floors and the wear layer
A great many floors in large buildings are engineered, and an engineered floor is only sandable down to its wear layer. We measure the wear layer before quoting a sand, because under the sanding threshold the honest answer is replacement rather than a refinish.
Where the floor is sound and only the finish is tired, the question is recoat against full sand, and we answer it on the floor with a test patch. Bare wood anywhere disqualifies a screen-and-recoat, and we show you where it is instead of describing it. A written grit sequence and finish schedule goes out with the quote, so the number of cuts and the number of coats are a commitment instead of a conversation.
Two jobs in one city that share almost no assumptions
Almost nothing above transfers between the two. The detached job answers to one household’s indoor climate, one slab or crawl space, one set of stairs and one owner’s decision; the unit job answers to a building’s rules, a shared structure, an elevator and somebody else’s date. The material can be the same white oak, and almost nothing else is.
The age of the stock changes what a sander finds
68.1 percent of Edina’s housing units were built before 1980, and the largest single build decade is the 1970s at 20.3 percent, so old finishes and old fasteners are common across the stock. Work that disturbs painted surfaces in pre-1978 housing falls under the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule, which the EPA administers directly here, because Minnesota is not an authorized state for that program. Around base, shoe and stair parts that is a live question on an older floor, and it belongs in the plan rather than in the middle of a workday.
16.9 percent of units were built in 2000 or later, which in a city of 15.96 square miles that is more than 95 percent developed usually means new work replaced something rather than filled an empty lot. Those floors carry their own list: telegraphing over a lively subfloor, fastener spacing across wider stock, hollow spots where adhesive went down cold. Newer is not the same as simpler.
What a permit covers, and what it does not
Finish work — painting, papering, tiling, carpeting, cabinets, countertops and similar finish work, in the code’s own wording — is exempt from a building permit under Minnesota Rules 1300.0120, and the exemption does not authorize work in violation of the code or any other ordinance. In practice a refinish or a like-for-like floor replacement here is not usually a permit item, while structural or mechanical work sitting under a floor can be. We say which side of that line a job falls on before it starts, in writing, with the rest of the numbers.
Two sets of assumptions, one city, and a quote that has to pick the right set. Whichever side of Edina’s stock a floor sits on, our first visit is a measurement visit: humidity, moisture content, grade, wear layer where it applies, and every number written down where you can read it again later.
- 20+ Years in the Trade
- Free Written Estimates
- Moisture Readings on Every Quote
