Hardwood installation in Talty, TX

Two things. First, the whole order comes from a single dye lot and gets racked and blended as we install, so there's no visible batch change halfway across the room. Second, the slab gets flattened properly before we start, grinding highs, filling lows, because on a Talty-sized floor a gentle wave in the concrete reads as a shadow line under raking light from the windows.

We'd usually talk you out of it. Talty houses are slab-on-grade on Houston Black clay, and solid wood on slab has to be installed over a plywood layer, which raises the floor height and still reacts to the seasonal moisture swing. Engineered wood gives you the same real wood surface with far more dimensional stability. If your heart is set on solid, we'll explain exactly what it takes first.

Our own installers. All About Floors has been doing this for 30 years, the core crew has been together for 20, and we have never subcontracted an installation to anyone. Labor carries a one-year warranty. On a house the size of most Talty builds, the install runs several days, and it's the same faces in your home each of those days rather than a rotating subcontract crew.

It rules out anything that needs a fastener driven into the concrete, because the steel cables inside are under load and cutting one is a serious repair. On a wood floor that costs you nothing. Engineered plank is either bonded to the surface with a urethane adhesive or floated over a pad, and neither method touches the inside of the slab.

Yes, and it is common here. Wood handles a dropped glass and a wiped-up spill without complaint. What it does not handle is standing water under a dishwasher, or an ice maker line that weeps for a month before anyone notices. Use engineered rather than solid, seal the run where the floor meets the cabinets, and keep full bathrooms on another material.

Baseboards usually stay put. We install to the wall and finish with shoe molding, which is cleaner than pulling trim that was caulked and painted in place. Door casings get undercut so the plank slides beneath them rather than being scribed around them, and if the new floor sits higher, interior doors get trimmed at the bottom.