Flooring Installation
The floor is the largest surface in your house and the one every other finish has to agree with. Getting the material and the subfloor right matters more than the colour.
Choosing the material for the house you actually have
Most DFW homes are slab on grade, which rules some options in and others out. Here is the honest version of each.
Luxury vinyl plank
A waterproof core with a printed and textured wear layer, usually installed as a floating floor. It handles slab moisture, tolerates more subfloor variation than glued or nailed floors, survives dogs, kids and spills, and runs continuously through a whole floor with no transitions. It cannot be refinished, so when the wear layer goes it gets replaced. For most families this is the right answer, and the good ones look genuinely convincing now.
Engineered wood
Real hardwood veneer over a stable plywood core. It moves far less with humidity swings than solid wood, which matters in North Texas where indoor humidity is very different in February and August. It can be glued directly to a slab. Depending on the wear-layer thickness, it can usually be refinished once or twice.
Solid hardwood
The one you can refinish repeatedly, and the one that ages best. It wants a wood subfloor to nail into, so on a slab it needs a plywood layer built up first, which raises the floor height and adds cost. It also moves with humidity, so it acclimates on site before installation and gets an expansion gap at the walls.
Tile and large-format porcelain
The right choice for bathrooms, laundries, entries and anywhere water lives. Large-format tile in particular looks superb and is the least forgiving material there is about a flat substrate.
Carpet
Still the best answer for bedrooms, media rooms and stairs, for warmth and for sound. Pad quality affects how the carpet feels and how long it lasts more than most people expect.
The subfloor is the job
If a floor fails early, the material is almost never the reason. These are.
- Flatness. Every flooring manufacturer specifies a flatness tolerance, and large-format tile and glued wood have the tightest ones. Most slabs need grinding down at the high spots or self-levelling compound in the low spots to meet it. Skip this and you get hollow-sounding tile, lippage at the edges where one tile stands proud of the next, and grout that cracks along the same line every year.
- Moisture. A slab that reads high on moisture will push adhesive loose and cup wood. It gets tested and, where needed, sealed. Putting a floating floor over a slab with an unresolved moisture source hides the problem rather than solving it.
- Acclimation. Wood sits in the house before it is installed so it reaches the humidity it will live in. Installing straight off the truck in August is how you get gaps in January.
- Expansion gaps. Floating and wood floors need room to move at the perimeter, hidden by baseboard or shoe. A floor pinned tight at both ends buckles.
- Transitions and door clearances. Where the new floor meets tile, an existing floor or a step, and whether doors still clear once the floor height changes. Planned before install, not discovered at the end.
- Baseboards. Either the base comes off and goes back down onto the new floor, or shoe molding is added to cover the gap. Both are fine, they look different, and it is your choice to make knowingly.
What drives the price
Flooring is quoted per square foot with the preparation priced separately, because the preparation is what varies from house to house.
- Material. The widest range on the list. Entry-level vinyl plank and wide-plank European oak are not in the same conversation.
- Square footage. Straightforward, but note that a floor running continuously through several rooms costs less per foot than the same area chopped into small ones.
- Subfloor preparation. Grinding, levelling and moisture treatment. This is the line that surprises people, and the one we would rather show you before we start.
- Demolition and disposal. Pulling carpet is quick. Removing old tile that is well bonded to a slab is heavy, dusty, slow work, and it is often the single largest labour item on a tile replacement.
- Pattern. Herringbone, chevron and diagonal layouts add both waste and labour against a straight lay.
- Stairs. Priced per tread and riser and always more per square foot than flat area, because every piece is cut and fitted individually.
- Furniture. Whether we move it and put it back.
How the work goes
- Measure and assess. Real measurements, subfloor condition, moisture, door clearances and transitions.
- Material selection. Samples in your light, on your floor, next to your cabinets, not under showroom lighting.
- Order and acclimate. Material on site ahead of installation where the product needs it.
- Clear and demo. Furniture out, old floor up, debris hauled off.
- Prep. Grind, level, patch, seal. The stage that decides everything after it.
- Install. Layout set so the pattern runs correctly to the longest sightline and full planks land where you look.
- Trim, transitions and base.
- Clean, furniture back, walkthrough.
When you should not replace the floor
- You have solid hardwood in reasonable condition. Sanding and refinishing costs less than replacement and gives you a better floor than anything you would replace it with. Do that instead.
- The tile is sound but the grout looks grey. Regrouting or a grout colour refresh transforms a tiled floor for a small fraction of a tear-out.
- There is an unexplained moisture problem. Find the source first. A new floor laid over an active leak or a slab moisture issue fails, and then you have paid twice.
- You are replacing one room at a time in a connected space. Matching a new floor to an existing run rarely looks right. Either do the connected area together or use a deliberate transition.
Why bring flooring to a design firm
Because flooring is a design decision that gets treated as a commodity. The plank width, the colour temperature against your cabinets and trim, the direction it runs, and where the pattern starts all change how a house feels, and none of them are on the price tag.
Our in-house designer helps you choose the floor against the rest of the room rather than in isolation, and because we also do the remodeling, the floor gets sequenced correctly with cabinets, tile and paint instead of arriving on the wrong day.
Every installation carries a 365-day workmanship warranty on our work.
Related services
- Kitchen remodeling and bathroom remodeling, where the floor is part of a bigger sequence
- Interior painting, best done before the new floor goes down
- Interior design if you want the floor chosen against everything else at once
Let's measure your floor
Book a consultation and we will assess the subfloor, recommend the material that suits your house, and quote the prep honestly rather than discovering it later.
Flooring installation in McKinney, Plano, Frisco, Prosper, Dallas, Carrollton, Celina, Allen, Aubrey, Little Elm, The Colony, Anna, Fort Worth and the surrounding DFW metro.