Craftsman bungalows hiding original oak
North Park, Kensington, Normal Heights, and Mission Hills are packed with Craftsman and Spanish bungalows from the twenties and thirties. Plenty of them still have their original narrow-strip oak hiding under carpet somebody laid decades ago.
Pulling that carpet is usually the best move available in these houses. If there's enough wood left above the joint, refinishing brings back material you simply can't buy new.
These houses also sit up off the ground, so what is happening in the crawlspace is part of the job, not an afterthought.
Coastal neighborhoods versus the inland north
Ocean Beach and Pacific Beach sit in damp air, and the houses are older. That pushes me toward engineered hardwood, or toward saving the floor that's already down.
4S Ranch and Rancho Bernardo are newer, built on slab, drier, open-plan, and full of stairs. The usual job up there's replacing the builder material across the whole main floor and doing the carpeted staircase at the same time.
Those are two different markets inside one city. Any page that treats San Diego as one thing is wrong for half the people reading it. That is also why three of the city's neighborhoods have pages of their own rather than a paragraph on this one: Point Loma, Carmel Valley and Santaluz each have enough that is specific to them — raised foundations and canyon stairs in the first, post-tension slab in the second, a gated community with its own rules in the third — to be worth reading on their own terms.
Where we focus
We work all over the city, but the middle of it for us is the coastal north. Carmel Valley, La Jolla, Del Mar, and the neighborhoods above Mission Bay. That is where most of our finished work already is.
For jobs further south we will be straight with you about the schedule instead of promising a service area we cannot cover properly.
San Diego flooring questions
Do you cover the whole City of San Diego?
We work all over the city, but the center of gravity is the coastal north — Carmel Valley, La Jolla, Del Mar, Point Loma, and the neighborhoods around them — and that is where most of the finished work in the gallery is. For jobs further south we will be straight with you about the schedule rather than promising a service area we cannot cover properly. Owner Stone Peters is on every installation himself with the same small crew, which is the honest constraint behind that answer.
Is there original oak under the carpet in North Park or Kensington?
Very often. North Park, Kensington, and Mission Hills are full of 1920s and 1930s Craftsman and Spanish bungalows that were floored in oak strip and carpeted over from the 1960s onward. Old-growth oak from that era is denser and more stable than most of what is milled today, so where enough wood remains above the tongue, refinishing costs less than replacement and gives you a floor that cannot be bought. We measure by lifting a floor vent rather than guessing.
Which San Diego neighborhoods do you work in most?
North Park, Kensington, Mission Hills and Normal Heights for period homes with original oak worth saving; Pacific Beach near the water; and 4S Ranch and Rancho Bernardo in the newer north city, where the builder floor is reaching the end of its life on post-tension slab. Those are two quite different markets inside one city, which is why a single page cannot describe it. Point Loma, Carmel Valley and Santaluz have pages of their own and go into more depth than this one does.