Hardwood Flooring in Foxborough, MA

Chestnut Green put 15 attached condominiums inside the 1889 hospital building at 16 Payson Road, with 50 townhouse condos and 73 single-family houses around it. Floors in the converted building went in during a redevelopment that wrapped up around 2009, so they are unlikely to have been sanded more than once and, if solid, still hold close to the full quarter inch of wood above the tongue. Check whether yours is engineered first: a face veneer thinner than about 3/32 inch takes a screen and recoat rather than a full sand.

The ranches and Capes that went up when Foxborough's population grew 44 percent in the 1950s. Builders of that decade laid 2-1/4-inch red oak strip through living rooms and bedrooms as a matter of course, and owners carpeted over it in the 1970s and 1980s. Lift a corner in a closet or pull a floor register: a 3/4-inch board edge with a tongue means a floor that has probably never been sanded and can take three to five refinishes over its life. About 19 percent of the town's housing dates from 1940 to 1959.

Two full floors of a Foxborough colonial, around 2,000 square feet, cost $8,000 to $11,000 to sand and refinish at $4 to $5.50 per square foot, which sits inside the $6,000 to $12,000-plus range for whole-house work. Staining adds 3 to 5 working hours per 1,000 square feet on top of the sanding. The stairs between the floors are priced separately because every tread is worked by hand with an edger and palm sander. Financing is available for up to 12 months at 0 percent on larger jobs.

Buildings of 50 or more units went from under 1 percent of Foxborough's housing to 7 percent in a decade, mostly rentals such as the Sylvan (248 units, 2016) and the Lodge at Foxborough (250 units, 2009), where flooring is the owner's decision. Condominium owners at Nadia Estates (36 units, 2017) or in the downtown mixed-use buildings on Wall Street and South Street answer to a master deed under Chapter 183A, which typically requires a sound-rated underlayment and sets working hours. Read that clause before choosing between glued engineered and nailed solid.

Roughly 19 percent of Foxborough's land carries a FEMA flood designation, with 2,002 acres at a 1 percent annual chance of flooding, so damp basements are common. Solid hardwood belongs on the floors above grade; below it, or over a slab, the sound choice is engineered plank glued or floated over a moisture barrier. Before either goes down the subfloor is metered, and its reading must stay within 4 percent of the wood's own moisture content. A floor that has already buckled after a wet spring is a repair question first.

Expect 25 to 40 machine hours for 1,200 square feet using a Lagler Hummel belt sander, an edger along the baseboards, a buffer and a palm sander, scaled from the 21 to 33 hours a 1,000-square-foot floor takes. A Cape adds friction: the upstairs rooms sit under sloped knee walls where the big sander cannot reach, so more of that footage goes to the edger, which already accounts for 4 to 6 hours per 1,000 square feet. Water-based Bona coats dry in one to two hours, so two coats often fit into the final day.