A lot of older Durham houses are sitting on oak nobody has looked at since the Nixon administration. Here’s how to find out if yours is one of them.
The tell is usually the doorway. If the carpet in a 1940s house meets the threshold of a bathroom or a coat closet and there’s a strip of finished wood peeking out under the transition, somebody carpeted over a floor instead of pulling it up. That happens more often in Durham than most homeowners realize.
Mario Vilchis has been pulling carpet off Durham floors since 2009. He runs Vilchis Hardwood Floors out of a shop on Obie Drive in South Durham, and a good share of his week is spent in houses in Trinity Park, Forest Hills, Watts-Hillandale, and the older pockets off Hope Valley Road. I asked him how often he opens up a carpeted floor in one of those neighborhoods and finds real wood underneath.
“More than half the time,” he said. “In the houses built before about 1960, it’s closer to three out of four. People are surprised. I’m not surprised anymore.”
Why the wood is down there in the first place
Houses built in Durham between the 1920s and the mid-1950s were framed with wood subfloor and finished with hardwood because that was simply how you finished a floor. Oak strip, usually two and a quarter inches wide, sometimes pine in the less expensive builds. Wall-to-wall carpet wasn’t widely affordable until the 1960s, and when it became affordable it became fashionable fast.
“Nobody was thinking about resale in 1968,” Vilchis said. “They wanted the house to look modern. Modern meant carpet. So they rolled it right over the oak.”
Which means the wood in a lot of these houses has spent fifty or sixty years protected from sunlight, foot traffic, dog claws, and vacuum cleaners. It is often in better shape than a comparable floor that stayed exposed.
How to check without wrecking anything
Vilchis walked me through what he tells homeowners to do before they call anybody.
Start in a closet. Pull the contents out, find a back corner, and lift the carpet off the tack strip with a pair of pliers. The strip is a thin piece of wood along the wall with upward-facing nails in it, and the carpet is hooked over those nails. You only need about eight inches of lift.
“Closet is the right place because if you tear something, nobody sees it,” he said. “And the floor in there tells you what the rest of the room looks like.”
Under the carpet there will be a pad, usually a crumbly orange or gray foam that has turned to dust. Under the pad, either plywood or wood. If it’s plywood or particleboard, stop. There’s no hardwood in that room, or somebody already took it out.
If it’s wood, look at three things. Whether the boards run in strips of consistent width, which means it’s a finished floor rather than a rough subfloor. Whether there’s any finish left, even a dull amber sheen. And whether the boards near the wall look darker or different from the ones in the middle, which usually means a rug sat there for decades and the exposed wood faded around it.
One thing he wanted me to include: check the second floor too, and check under the stair runner. “People pull up carpet downstairs, get excited, and never look upstairs. Half the time it’s the same floor up there.”
What you’ll probably find, and what it means
The most common finding is oak in decent shape with holes. Not holes in the wood exactly, but hundreds of staple and tack punctures around the perimeter where the carpet was fastened, plus the tack strip nail holes themselves.
“That looks terrible when you first see it and it’s almost never a problem,” Vilchis said. “It’s a quarter inch in from the wall and it sands out or it disappears under the baseboard shoe. I’ve had people call me convinced their floor is ruined because of tack strip holes. It’s the least of it.”
The things that actually matter, in his order:
Water damage, especially around dishwashers, refrigerators, exterior doors, and the wall under a bathroom. Carpet hides a slow leak for years. If the boards are cupped, meaning the edges are higher than the middle, something got wet.
Pet stains, which soak through the pad into the wood and go black. Black staining from urine penetrates deep and often can’t be sanded out. Sometimes those boards get woven out and replaced.
Remaining thickness. A solid oak floor has wood above the tongue that can be sanded, and each full refinish takes off a fraction of it. A floor that’s already been sanded four times may not have another one in it.
“That last one is the only one I really need to see in person,” he said. “I can pull a floor vent cover off and look at the edge of the board. Takes thirty seconds and it tells me whether we’re refinishing or replacing.”
When the answer is no
I asked him how often he tells someone their floor isn’t worth saving.
“Not often, but it happens. Sometimes the wood is pine and it’s soft and beat up and the homeowner had oak in their head. Sometimes it’s been sanded to the nails. And sometimes I get into a house where a previous owner glued the pad down instead of using tack strip, and now there’s adhesive in the grain, and the sanding to get that out costs more than it’s worth.”
He also mentioned a scenario that catches people: patch jobs. If a wall was moved or a doorway closed up at some point, there’s often a section of mismatched wood or plywood where the old wall stood. That has to be woven in with matching material, and matching sixty-year-old oak is slow work.
“I’d rather tell somebody up front that it’s a three-day patch than have them find out on day two.”
The money part
Vilchis quotes sanding and refinishing an existing floor at roughly $3 to $5 per square foot in the Triangle right now, against $8 to $14 for new solid hardwood installed. For a 900-square-foot main floor, that’s a real difference.
The carpet removal itself is something most homeowners can do, and he says so without being asked. Cut it into strips, roll it, pull the tack strip, pull the staples. It’s a weekend of unpleasant work and it takes a line item off the estimate.
“Some people want to do it, some people don’t want to touch it. I’m not going to pretend it’s skilled labor. It’s not.”
He does want to look at the floor before it’s fully uncovered, though, which sounded backwards to me until he explained it. Once the carpet is gone the homeowner has already committed to doing something with the room, and if the floor turns out to be unsalvageable they’re living on bare subfloor while they figure it out. He’d rather see a closet corner first and give them a real answer while the carpet is still down.
For anyone who wants to start there, Vilchis Hardwood Floors does free in-home measurements across Durham, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and the rest of the Triangle, and Vilchis says he’ll tell you if refinishing is the wrong call.
The part he kept coming back to
Twice during our conversation he circled back to the same point, which is that the greenest and cheapest floor in most of these houses is the one already sitting under the carpet.
“A floor from 1948 that gets sanded and finished right will outlast anything I could sell you to replace it. It’s already survived eighty years. The wood is done moving. It’s not going to surprise you.”
That struck me as an odd thing for someone in the flooring business to keep saying. I said so.
He laughed. “I’m going to be working in Durham in ten years. People talk.”
Vilchis Hardwood Floors is at 237 Obie Dr, Durham. (919) 794-1116.
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Photo Credit: James Oliver
