Langley · About 30 minutes from Maple Ridge

Flooring installation in Langley

Langley is over the Golden Ears Bridge from Maple Ridge. Walnut Grove is just off the bridge, and Langley City is about half an hour from our base. It's two municipalities: the City of Langley in the middle, and the much larger Township of Langley around it, which takes in Walnut Grove, Willoughby, Murrayville, Brookswood, Fort Langley and Aldergrove.

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The job changes with the neighbourhood. Walnut Grove and Murrayville are mostly established family homes, many still with carpet on the stairs and older floors in the kitchen. Willoughby is newer: townhomes, rowhomes and recently built houses, where owners are often replacing builder-grade floors. Out toward Brookswood and Aldergrove the lots get bigger and the houses more rural.

New concrete is still drying

Willoughby has been one of the fastest-growing parts of Langley, and many of its townhomes have a ground floor on a concrete slab poured only a few years ago. Concrete keeps giving off moisture long after it's hard, and a thick slab can take months to dry out. A floor laid too soon traps that moisture: laminate cores swell, glue lets go, and mould can grow where nobody looks. The fix is simple: a moisture test on the slab before anything is ordered, and the vapour barrier or underlay the manufacturer calls for under any floating floor.

Where the new floor meets the old

Plenty of Langley homes had one level redone at some point, so a new floor often has to meet an existing one: hardwood in the dining room, tile at the entry, carpet staying in the bedrooms. Different floors sit at different heights; a 3/4-inch hardwood board stands taller than a 12mm laminate, for example. Each join needs trim made for it: a T-moulding where two floors sit level, a reducer where one is lower, and an end cap against tile or a door threshold. Planned at the measure, the joins land in doorways, where they look intended.

A worn oak floor isn't always a replacement

Some older Langley houses have solid oak or maple floors that look tired: grey traffic lanes, scratches, a dull finish. If the boards are solid wood with enough thickness above the tongue, they can usually be sanded back to bare wood and refinished for less than a new floor, and the colour can change while they're bare. Engineered flooring is different: its real-wood top layer may be thin enough that it can be sanded only once or twice, or not at all. Which one you have is the first thing to check at the measure.

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