Lakeville Wood Flooring has spent more than twenty years installing, sanding and finishing wood flooring in Elko New Market and the rest of the south metro. The first visit is a measurement visit rather than a sales call, and it ends with numbers rather than a brochure. We take a relative humidity reading inside the house on that first visit and write it on the quote, with the 30 to 50 percent band wood flooring is specified for printed beside it.
Before anything is ordered we measure the moisture content of the flooring and of the subfloor against each other, and both numbers are recorded. Board width is chosen against the species’ own dimensional change coefficient, so the seasonal movement to expect at that width is stated in writing rather than discovered in February. Where a floor is being sanded, the grit sequence and the finish schedule are handed over with the quote, which makes the number of cuts and the number of coats a commitment instead of a conversation.
Elko New Market asks a question of a flooring quote that most cities do not: which part of the city is the house in. Two nineteenth-century village cores sit a few miles apart inside one set of municipal limits, with two decades of newer construction filling the ground between them. A floor in one of those settings is a different job from a floor in the other, and we quote it that way.
Two villages that became one city in 2007
The city is younger than most of the houses in it. Officials from the two villages first met about a merger in October 2005, a referendum on March 21, 2006 approved it by 84 percent, and the merger took effect on January 1, 2007. Everything older than that date belongs to one of the two villages, not to Elko New Market.
New Market was incorporated as a village in 1895 by German and Prussian emigrants who settled around a German Catholic church, and it had a post office, general stores and several other businesses by the late 1870s. Its public school closed in 1916, when the parish school opened. That is a settlement built around a church and a short main street, and the oldest buildings in it still stand where that pattern put them.
Elko arrived later and for a different reason. A railroad platted it in 1902, it drew a large number of Scandinavian Lutherans, and it was not incorporated until 1949, after a liquor-license dispute with the Township Board. Its public school merged with Lakeville’s in the 1950s. A railroad plat lays out a different street grid and a different building stock than a church settlement does, and this city contains both.
One permit counter, two building stocks
The City of Elko New Market runs a single Community Development Department, which takes building, HVAC, plumbing, sign and fence permit applications through an online Building Permit Portal. Work is reviewed against the Minnesota State Building Code as the city administers it. We tell you at the quote whether what we have scoped is the kind of interior finish work that falls under the exemption in Minnesota Rules 1300.0120 or whether it reaches something a permit has to cover.
Two school districts, one set of city limits
The split shows up in ordinary municipal life as well. The city names two public school districts serving it, Lakeville Area Schools ISD 194 and New Prague Area Schools ISD 721, plus Holy Cross Catholic School, and which one serves an address depends on where in the city that address sits. Eagle View Elementary was built within the city recently and belongs to the New Prague district.
Looking for wood-flooring closer to Prior Lake? See Prior Lake Wood-Flooring.
What stands here from before the subdivisions
The New Market Hotel and Store, built in 1897, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 17, 1980, as a well-preserved example of the late-nineteenth-century commercial buildings of Scott County towns. There is no municipal heritage preservation commission here, and that listing is administered through the Minnesota State Historic Preservation Office.
Housing of that vintage is a small share of the city. About 12.6 percent of the 1,689 housing units here predate 1980 and 2.8 percent predate 1940, and the American Community Survey estimates behind those shares carry wide margins at a place this size. We read them as shares rather than as a roster of which house is which, and we take the age of a particular house from the house itself.
Age changes a sanding quote for a practical reason. The federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule at 40 CFR 745.83 governs work that disturbs painted surfaces in housing built before 1978, and a floor sand runs an edger along painted base molding. So we ask the age of the house and what is on the trim before we price the work.
Sanding a floor that has been sanded before
An old-core floor usually carries thickness history we cannot see from the doorway. We check what is left above the tongue before quoting a full sand, because a floor already cut two or three times can reach sand-through at the fastener line and turn a refinish into board replacement. Where the floor is engineered, the wear layer is measured before it is quoted for sanding at all, since under the sanding threshold the honest answer is replacement rather than a refinish.
Recoat against full sand is answered on the floor with a test patch, and we show you the patch. Bare wood anywhere disqualifies a screen-and-recoat, because a buff and coat will not bond where the finish has already worn through. The grit sequence written on the quote, a 36, 50 and 80 progression on a floor that needs it, is what keeps drum marks, edger swirl and chatter marks out of the result instead of sanded over.
Patching into a floor nobody can order more of
Repairs in the two old cores are rarely whole rooms. A dutchman patch, a weave-in through a doorway or a run of board replacement has to match species, cut and board width, and quartersawn or rift sawn boards set into a plainsawn field read as a stripe under any finish. Where a patch sits over a different subfloor than the surrounding field, we flatten it first, because telegraphing shows up in the finished surface long after anyone is still thinking about the layer underneath.
The ground that filled in between them
Most of the city’s houses are newer than either village. Around 80.4 percent of the housing units here were built in 2000 or later, and they occupy the ground between the two old cores. They also sit on foundations the nineteenth-century blocks never had: walkouts, lookouts and finished lower levels on slab.
Grade is not a figure of speech in the installation guidelines we work to. Soil sitting within three inches of a floor puts that level below grade, so a lookout or a walkout lower level is quoted as what it is rather than as another main floor with stairs. Saying that at the quote stage costs nothing, and saying it after the material is delivered costs a floor.
Lower-level work is quoted from a moisture reading taken on that slab, never inferred from the floor above it. We run an in-situ relative humidity test to ASTM F2170 in the slab itself, because slab relative humidity is what drives adhesion failure and vapor-related cupping. The vapor retarder and the adhesive are then chosen against that number rather than against habit.
Frost, footings and seasonal movement
Scott County is named in Minnesota Rules 1303.1600 Zone II, where the minimum allowable footing depth due to freezing is three and one-half feet. That is a foundation requirement rather than a flooring one, but it describes what the ground here does between seasons. A floor laid tight across framing that moves will find the weakest joint, so we plan expansion at the walls and at the transitions instead of trusting the field to absorb it.
Attached homes and what travels through the assembly
About 8.3 percent of the city’s housing units are one-unit attached, and 101 of the 1,487 owner-occupied units take that form. A shared wall or a shared floor-ceiling assembly makes impact insulation class and sound transmission class part of the flooring decision, because a hard surface replacing carpet changes what carries through. We specify the underlayment for the assembly at the quote rather than after the first conversation about footsteps.
Winter is the constraint, not the installation
The hard part of a wood floor in this climate is not the week it goes down; it is the twelve months after. Wood moves with the moisture in the air around it, and a Minnesota winter pulls indoor humidity well below the 30 to 50 percent band the flooring is specified for. We explain that conflict before the work is booked rather than after the gaps appear.
On a deep cold snap the humidity a house can safely hold sits below the bottom of the floor’s own specification, because pushing indoor moisture higher at 5 degrees outside puts water on the windows and into the wall assembly. That is a genuine conflict rather than a maintenance failure, and the honest version is that the floor will run at the dry end of its range for part of the year. Seasonal gapping that opens in February and closes by July is the floor doing what the species and the board width said it would do.
That is why board width is a decision rather than a preference. A wide plank in a species with a high dimensional change coefficient shows more seasonal movement at every joint than a narrow strip of the same wood, and that expected movement goes in writing before the order is placed. An engineered assembly is the other answer, since it moves less across its width, which is often the right call for a lower level or a house that runs very dry.
Acclimation is a number, not a waiting period
The flooring and the subfloor have to reach a moisture content differential the guidelines allow for the board width being installed, and we measure both rather than counting days off a delivery slip. A pinless meter reads the field and a pin meter confirms it where the number matters, and both readings are recorded before the first board goes down. Installing across too wide a differential is how a floor ends up cupping in its first heating season, or dry cupping and then crowning when someone sands the cup out too early.
Finishing a house that keeps its windows shut
Forced-air heat dries a house faster than it warms it, and that changes the finish schedule as much as the season does. A two-component waterborne finish behaves differently in a dry January house than an oil-modified polyurethane does, and each has a recoat window that does not care about the calendar. We plan dust containment with HEPA-filtered equipment and plan ventilation and cure around a house whose windows stay closed for months.
Return-to-service times are given in writing: when the floor can be walked on, when furniture can come back, and when rugs can go down. Those dates are part of the quote, along with the grit sequence and the finish schedule, so the plan you agree to is the plan that runs.
- 20+ Years in the Trade
- Free Written Estimates
- Moisture Readings on Every Quote
