Hardwood floor installation done for the desert.

Supply and install, from one team

Olympic Hardwood is both the showroom and the installer. You pick the floor off our wall in Phoenix, and the crew that lays it works for the same company that sold it to you. There's no one to point at when something goes wrong — which is the main reason we do it this way.

We install engineered and solid hardwood in houses across the Valley: new builds, whole-house remodels, one room at a time. The work includes tearing out whatever is on the floor now, preparing the slab or subfloor, laying the floor, and finishing the edges properly with baseboards, shoe moulding and transitions to tile or stone.

The five things that actually decide the result

1. 1

   A flat subfloor

   Wood flooring needs the surface underneath it to sit within a tolerance of roughly 3/16 of an inch over 10 feet. We fill dips and gouges with levelling compound and grind down the high spots. Skip this and you get hollow spots, movement underfoot, and joints that open early.

2. 2

   A moisture reading, not a guess

   This is the step that separates Phoenix from most of the country. Concrete releases moisture for months; new slabs need around 90 days to cure before wood goes over them. All the wet work — plaster, paint, stucco — has to be finished, and the drainage outside has to be sorted. We test the slab and, if the reading is high, we tell you what it will take to make it safe rather than laying the floor and hoping.

3. 3

   Acclimation in a house that's running

   Wood is hygroscopic — it trades moisture with the air around it until the two are in balance. Flooring delivered from a warehouse into a Phoenix home that isn't yet air-conditioned will keep moving after it's installed, and that movement shows up as gaps, cupping or buckling. We stabilise the interior first, run the HVAC the way you'll actually live with it, and let the material settle before we open a single box.

4. 4

   The right fastening method

   Nail, staple, glue or float — the choice follows the subfloor, the product and the room, not habit. The table below is the honest version of that decision.

5. 5

   Expansion space and clean edges

   Every floor needs room to move at the perimeter, hidden behind baseboards and shoe moulding. Doorways, thresholds and the meeting points with tile or stone are where a floor either looks finished or looks fitted. We plan those before we start, not once we get there.

Nail, staple, glue or float

Four ways to attach a wood floor, each with a job it does best.

Removing what's there now

Carpet is easy. Tile is not, and glued-down wood is the slowest of all — the adhesive has to come off the concrete before anything new can bond to it. We do all of it, including the ones other crews decline. One client had us take out a glued-down wood floor and replace it with a wide plank French oak; another had us remove tile ahead of a whole-house install.

Because tile removal is its own piece of work with its own dust problem, it has its own page.

Edges, stairs and patterns

Baseboards and trim. Clients mention this more than anything else in their reviews, and there's a reason: the baseboard line is what your eye reads as "finished". We remove and reset existing baseboards or fit new ones, and we handle the shoe moulding that hides the expansion gap.

Stairs. We've carried a floor across three levels of one home — hardwood over slab downstairs, a wood-framed staircase in the middle, a different subfloor upstairs — and made the surface read as one continuous material. Each level needs its own preparation.

Patterns. Herringbone and other geometric layouts are a different craft and a different cost. We've laid them; we'll quote them honestly.

Details that go wrong elsewhere. Floor outlets, undercut drywall curves, floors that run into a floating wall board rather than stopping at a baseboard — a Spanish Territorial home in North Scottsdale needed all three.