About Somerville Wood Flooring

Somerville Wood Flooring is a wood flooring company in Somerville, MA with 20+ years of experience refinishing, repairing and installing hardwood floors. Most of our work happens inside occupied buildings: the two-families, three-families and condos where one household’s floor sits directly above another’s ceiling, and where a floor job affects more people than the ones paying for it.

The floors we see are mostly old. Narrow red oak strip and eastern white pine that have been sanded before, patched where radiators and walls came out, and sometimes hidden under carpet or tile for decades. We like those floors, and we have built our way of working around keeping them in service.

Our Approach

We start by finding out what we are dealing with before we price anything. That means measuring how much wood is left above the tongue on an old strip or pine floor, checking the build year and any painted surfaces because Massachusetts runs its own lead-safe renovation rules for homes built before 1978, and identifying old resilient tile or black mastic so it is left to the right trade instead of being sanded. When water is involved, we trace it, read the boards with a moisture meter and document each room for the adjuster before deciding what to replace.

Then we plan the work around the people in the building. In a multi-family house we work one unit or one floor at a time, seal doors and returns so dust stays where it is made, and write down in advance the days that shared hallway stairs and landings will be closed. Finishes are chosen to fit the Massachusetts VOC limits for wood coatings, with drying and fume times planned for whoever is living above or below. Condo jobs follow the association’s own notice and work-hour rules, which we read from the documents rather than guess at.

Every estimate is written and itemized, so a homeowner can compare it line by line and a landlord can file it with the move-out paperwork Massachusetts asks for. Stairs are priced tread by tread, because a staircase is hand work and not a square-foot job. Repairs where radiators, pipes or old walls came out are done with boards woven into the existing floor, and stain and sheen samples go down on your own floor before anyone chooses a color.

Vacant rental units get the same care on a tighter clock. We schedule sanding and finish coats to land between one lease and the next, so the unit is ready on the new tenant’s move-in date.

What We Do

We handle wood floor refinishing, screen and recoat, pine floor refinishing, hardwood floor repair and water damage repair, hardwood stair refinishing, hardwood floor installation, engineered hardwood flooring, carpet-to-hardwood conversions, and herringbone and wide plank floors. Whether it is one room, one unit or a whole building, we would be glad to look at the floor and give you a free, written estimate.