Refinish or Replace an Oregon Floor?
Ten minutes with a pry bar in a closet is the cheapest research in this whole process. Under a lot of Oregon carpet there is a floor that only needs sanding.
Look first
Pull the carpet back in a closet or behind a door. You are looking for board rather than sheet goods, and for how much thickness is left above the tongue. A floor that has been sanded three times already may have nothing left to give.
Portland is 26.8% pre-1940 against a median build year of 1966, so on the west side the odds are genuinely good. Statewide the figure is 10.7%. What is underneath, and how to tell in five minutes.
The Douglas fir question
An Oregon floor from that era is usually vertical-grain Douglas fir, and it is not oak. Fir measures 660 on the Janka scale against red oak’s 1,290, so it dents more easily and it sands differently. Old-growth fir is tight-ringed and considerably harder than the modern product sold under the same name, which is why a floor that looks soft on paper often is not.
The practical consequence: sanding fir is a specialist job. It burnishes if the machine is wrong and it shows every mistake, because the grain gives the sander nothing to hide behind. Ask whether the person quoting has sanded fir before. It is a fair question and the answer is usually immediate.
Roughly what each path costs
| Path | Relative cost | When it is the right call |
|---|---|---|
| Refinish | About a third of replacing | Sound boards, enough thickness left, and you like the species |
| Repair, then refinish | Refinishing plus the repair | A few damaged boards, or a patch where a wall came out |
| Replace | Full price | Sanded out, water damaged, or you want a different material entirely |
Those are proportions rather than quotes. Put your own room into the estimator for a range. Final price depends on your project.
When refinishing is not the bargain it looks like
- The boards move underfoot. Refinishing a floor does not fix what it is fastened to.
- Water has been under it. Cupped or blackened boards near a dishwasher or an entry are a repair before they are a finish.
- You want a different look entirely. Stain shifts the color of fir less predictably than oak, and fighting that is expensive.
- The floor does not run everywhere you want floor. Matching new fir to old is harder than matching oak.
The entry is the part that decides
West of the crest a floor takes 163 wet days a year in Portland, and it is the first four feet inside the door that show it. If the field of the floor is sound and only the entry is worn, that is a repair and a refinish rather than a replacement. What the entry actually needs.