Hardwood Flooring Installation & Refinishing — Manchester, NH

Working from $4 to $5.50 per square foot, 1,000 square feet comes to $4,000 to $5,500 before stain. One level of a Rimmon Heights or Hallsville house generally falls inside the $1,500 to $6,500 that single-floor jobs cost, and refinishing an entire North End Victorian, three floors and the stairs between them, runs $6,000 to $12,000 and beyond. Stairs are the variable in Manchester's older stock: every tread is edged and hand-sanded, and if a house built between 1880 and 1920 for an Amoskeag manager kept both its front and service stairs, both are priced by the tread.

In the $20,000 to $44,000 range for material and labor, since installed hardwood runs $10 to $22 per square foot; a single 1,000-square-foot level is $10,000 to $22,000. Of that, labor is $3 to $10 per square foot, straight-lay at the low end and a herringbone or chevron field at $8 to $10 and above. With 28 to 33 percent of Manchester's housing built before 1940, the subfloor line is common here: leveling or overlaying an old board subfloor in a Notre Dame triple-decker or a North End house adds $2 to $10 per square foot, or $900 to $3,000 for one full floor, while a 1960s ranch in the outer neighborhoods usually skips it.

They set the outer edges. Manchester's noise ordinance prohibits construction activity above its decibel limits between 9pm and 7am, so a belt sander in a house on The Hill, the raised section of the North End between Maple, North, Pearl and Walnut Streets, has a 14-hour legal window and in practice runs a normal working day inside it. Coats of water-based finish are quiet and dry in one to two hours, so a second coat can go on toward evening without touching the ordinance. Anyone with a tighter house rule, a condo association in a Millyard conversion for instance, should hand that schedule to the crew before day one.

Floors are interior work, so no. The Heritage Commission reviews qualifying outdoor building permit applications inside the city's historic districts, the Amoskeag Millyard Historic District among them, for their effect on the district; sanding, staining and coating a floor produce no exterior change and no hearing. What can trigger review is anything a floor project grows into that shows from the street, such as replacing a door or adding a bulkhead to move material, so keep that out of scope or file it separately. Converted mill buildings like the 1885 Amoskeag Apartments answer instead to their own association rules on hours, elevators and access.

One at a time works, provided the finish is water-based. Bona Traffic HD and Bona Mega ONE are low enough in VOC, 150 and 200 g/L, that the households above and below stay put, and the unit being done takes furniture back three or five days after the last coat. Each level of a Notre Dame or Rimmon Heights triple-decker is a separate 21 to 33 hour sanding job per 1,000 square feet, and dustless sanding with HEPA vacuums holds back 90 to 95 percent of the dust while plastic film seals the unit's door from the common stair. Oil-based Woodline, at 700 g/L, would empty the building.

During the heating season, probably. Once the furnace runs, indoor humidity falls to 20 to 30 percent, against 50 to 60 percent in August, and a wide plank moves more across its width than 2¼-inch strip, so 7-inch white oak in a North End dining room will open hairline gaps around February and close them by June. That much is normal and not a defect. Keeping the house from dropping into the low 20s all winter narrows the swing, and the installation side of the same problem is why boards over 3¼ inches are glued as well as nailed. Buckling or cupping, as opposed to hairline gaps, points to a moisture source, not the season.