Hardwood Floor Installation in Columbia, SC

A hardwood install starts before any wood comes off the truck. The subfloor gets checked for moisture and for flatness, because a floor laid over a damp slab or an uneven plywood deck will show problems within a year, not right away. In Columbia a lot of homes sit on slab, and slabs hold ground moisture longer than people expect, so that check matters more here than it does in a lot of places.

Once the subfloor passes, the wood has to sit in the house and acclimate to the room's humidity before it goes down. Skip that step and the boards will move after installation, either gapping in winter or crowning in summer. Then boards get laid, racked for grain and color mix, cut in around vents and door jambs, and finished off with transitions where the hardwood meets tile, carpet, or a different room.

We use nail down installation over plywood subfloors and glue down over slab, since a slab won't hold a nail the same way plywood does. Either way the goal is the same, a floor that stays flat and tight through a Columbia summer and a Columbia winter.