Hardwood Flooring in Rochester, NY

Hardwood flooring in Rochester is mostly an old-house story. Census figures compiled from the 2019-2023 American Community Survey show that about 53.7% of the city's housing units were built in 1939 or earlier, and the city reached its peak population of 332,488 in 1950, before the suburbs filled in. Many of those homes still have their first floors: narrow red oak or maple strips, nailed tight over board subfloors. Under worn finish, gray traffic lanes and a few pet stains, that wood can often be sanded back to bare and finished again.

Refinish, recoat or replace

These are three different jobs at three different prices, and picking the right one saves the most money.

• Screen and recoat: the finish is dull and scratched but the wood is not exposed. A light abrasion and a fresh coat of finish, about $1 to $2.50 per square foot in Fixr's published figures.
• Full sand and refinish: the finish is worn through to gray wood, there are deep scratches or stains, or you want a new color. Fixr lists $3 to $5.50 per square foot for sanding and refinishing, and $3 to $8 across all refinishing methods.
• Replacement: boards are too thin to sand again, badly water damaged, or loose over a failed subfloor. Fixr puts new solid hardwood at about $9 to $23 per square foot installed.

The way to tell which one you need is to look at the edge of a board at a floor register or threshold. If there is a healthy layer of wood above the tongue, a sanding is on the table.

Winter is the hard season for wood here

Rochester has a humid continental climate and averages about 102 inches of snow a year (1991-2020 normals), much of it lake-effect snow off Lake Ontario, with a January daily mean of about 26°F. Two things follow for floors. First, the furnace runs for months, and heated indoor air gets very dry; one Great Lakes flooring guide puts winter indoor humidity at 20 to 30 percent, while many manufacturers ask for roughly 35 to 55 percent. Below that range boards shrink and gaps open, then mostly close again in the humid summer. Second, snow, grit and road salt come in on boots every day. Salt residue is abrasive once the water dries, and the meltwater can wick into seams near entry doors. That is why the first three feet inside a Rochester front door often look ten years older than the rest of the room.

Old trim, old paint

Many older homes pair their floors with natural-finish trim; the 19th Ward is known for gumwood trim, leaded glass and hardwood floors. We protect that woodwork while sanding. Painted baseboards and shoe molding are a different matter. In a home built before 1978, the EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting rule applies to work that disturbs lead-based paint, and its small-job exemption covers only 6 square feet or less of painted surface per room indoors. Pulling shoe molding around a whole room can go past that. We point out painted trim at the estimate and plan the job so it can be removed and handled correctly, or left in place where that makes more sense.

Get a Free Estimate

What a typical refinishing job includes

• A walk-through to check board thickness, earlier sandings, loose boards, stains and moisture
• Moving furniture out (or planning around it), sealing doorways and covering vents and radiators
• Setting and filling any raised nails, re-nailing loose boards and replacing boards that cannot be saved
• Sanding in stages from coarse to fine, with edges and corners done by hand machines
• Stain samples on your floor if you want color, then the stain
• Sealer and finish coats, with drying time between them and a written schedule for when you can walk, move furniture back and lay rugs

Matching new wood to old

Additions, kitchen openings and old floor-register holes all leave spots where new boards have to meet century-old ones. Strip widths in older Rochester homes are often narrower than the standard stock sold today, and old red oak has darkened with age. We match width and species, weave the new boards into the old ones instead of butting them in a straight line, and then sand and finish the whole room together so the patch blends in.

Rochester is home base, from the big houses near East Avenue and Park Avenue to the 19th Ward, Browncroft and Corn Hill. We also work in the towns and villages around the city: Irondequoit, Greece, Gates and Chili to the north and west, with Spencerport, Brockport and Hilton further out; Brighton, Pittsford, Henrietta and Honeoye Falls to the south; Penfield, Webster, East Rochester and Fairport to the east; and Victor and Canandaigua in Ontario County. The housing changes as you move out from the city. Inner-ring neighborhoods are mostly prewar homes with original strip floors that have often been sanded before, so thickness matters. Postwar towns like Irondequoit and Greece have many houses from the 1940s and 1950s, often with oak floors hidden under carpet. Newer subdivisions further out lean toward engineered and prefinished floors that call for a recoat or a board repair more often than a full sanding. Each area page covers what we see there.