Sharon, MA Hardwood Floors, Refinished or Newly Installed

Home Depot's own refinishing guide sends you to its tool rental for a drum sander and an edger, and the job it offers to do for you is new floor installation. The same guide suggests practicing on old plywood before the drum sander touches your floor and warns that an edger can be hard to control. The rest of the job is yours too: pulling the shoe molding, working up through three grits of paper, changing the belt about every 250 square feet, and laying several coats with light sanding between them.

About $4,000 to $9,000 for the sanding and the finish on a floor that size. What you see and what you choose decide where in that range you land: how worn the floor is, the sanding level, a stain, and the finish system. Board repairs, if the floor needs any, are priced on their own lines. The written estimate after our visit fixes the number, and it doesn't drift once the work starts. For a rough figure today, try the estimator.

No. Resurfacing, also called a recoat, means screening the old finish lightly and putting a fresh coat on top, so the color stays exactly as it is now. It suits a floor that has only gone dull. Refinishing sands down to bare wood, takes out scratches that have reached the wood, and is the only way to change the color. A recoat is the smaller job and costs less, but it only works while the old finish is still holding.

About $12,000 to $26,400, with the boards and the labor both in that figure. Where you land in it comes down to the wood you pick and how it is laid, and a pattern costs more to lay than straight rows. Once we have measured the rooms, the written estimate splits the wood from the labor.

No. Sharon's demolition delay bylaw covers buildings 100 or more years old, but it works through the demolition permit: the Historical Commission steps in when someone applies to pull down such a building or part of it. Sanding and refinishing a floor is not demolition. Sharon's four local historic districts, among them the North Main Street block with the library and two churches, Cobb's Tavern on Bay Road and the Wilber School on South Main Street, answer to a district commission that reviews only exterior architectural features under state law.