Flooring in Cohoes, NY

Flooring in Cohoes, New York

Cohoes carries the dense, older housing of a mill city: workers row housing, Victorians and two-family homes on tight urban lots, most of it late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In houses of that age the floor covering is rarely the real problem. What people feel as a cold floor is usually an uninsulated crawlspace, an unconditioned basement, or air leaking at the perimeter where floor meets wall.

So we assess what is under the floor before quoting what goes on top of it. Insulating underlayment, a vapour barrier over a slab or unheated basement, and sealing the floor-to-wall perimeter will do more for comfort and for your heating bill than any change of surface material.

Cohoes carries the dense, older housing stock of a mill city, workers row housing, Victorians and two-family homes on tight urban lots, much of it from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Insulation, windows and heating systems in this stock are frequently original or close to it.

In Cohoes the energy envelope is usually the highest-return work in the house, and we treat it that way. Mastaba has worked in Cohoes and the surrounding Capital Region for over 15 years. Jeffrey Mason personally manages every project, and our own crew covers carpentry, plumbing, electrical, tile and finish work, so there is no subcontractor coordination for you to chase.

Flooring is the largest continuous surface in a house and the one that takes the most abuse. In the Capital Region it also has to cope with a humidity swing of forty points between an August afternoon and a January morning, which is why floors installed without acclimation gap in winter and cup in summer.

Why flooring in Cohoes is really an envelope question

Cohoes carries the dense, older housing stock of a mill city: workers' row housing, Victorians and two-family homes on tight urban lots, much of it built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In houses of that age the floor covering is rarely the real problem. What people feel as a cold floor is usually an uninsulated crawlspace, an unconditioned basement, or an air leak at the perimeter where the floor meets the wall.

That is why we assess what is under the floor before quoting what goes on top of it. Insulating underlayment and a vapour barrier over a slab or an unheated basement, and sealing the floor-to-wall perimeter, will do more for comfort and for your heating bill than any change of surface material. On an unconditioned crawlspace it is one of the better returns available in a house of this vintage.

On the covering itself, the practical answer for most Cohoes houses is luxury vinyl plank or engineered wood rather than solid hardwood. Both tolerate the humidity swing of an old, leaky building far better than solid wood, which cups in August and gaps in January when it is laid over an uncontrolled substrate. Where there is original hardwood with wear layer remaining, refinishing usually costs a fraction of replacement and keeps the floor that belongs in the house.