Tip: Good Selling Point For Hardwood Installers

I thought about this topic because it may be a great angle in getting more hardwood jobs for installers. We all hear the talk about this engineered floor can be refinished one, two, and three times blah, blah, blah. That’s what the manufacturers, dealers, and salespeople say, but does anyone go as far as educating the buyer if it can be refinished that many times? Much has to do with sub floor flatness.

Next time you hear a customer balk at floor prep charges or simply want to go with the cheaper guy that mentions little about floor prep, throw this in, you may get the job. Let’s use a 1,000 square foot engineered floor example with a wear layer/veneer thickness of 2.0 millimeters, common with many manufacturers. The customer paid $ 7.00 square foot for materials.

Consumers know little about construction techniques so I’ve thrown in this analogy more are familiar with. Compare the peeling of a carrot. The utensil used to peel needs to remove high spots and excess skin to reveal a consistent appearance. The knife cannot possibly remove the skin in consistent fashion because the carrot is not flat, but bumpy; more has to be peeled.

The same is true of sanding any floor. Sanding equipment operates on a parallel plane. With any high and low areas, the sanding equipment will require more passes to remove the older skin of the floor to reveal a surface that is acceptable for a new finish application. In that time, higher areas of the floor will see more hardwood being removed. In some cases depending on the original sub floor condition the sander may break through the wear layer.

Let’s go back to your bid. An extra $ 1,000 for floor prep? The customer laughs you out the door. Ten years later the customer wants to refinish the hardwood floors. The finishers try, but the floor exposes many areas where the sander broke through the wear layer. Unacceptable for the customer, they want a new floor.

If you got your point across you could have saved the customer quite a bit of dough and made the customer yours. Sure present times are tough and money is tight, but ask them if $ 1,000 now is better than $8- $ 9,000 later (adjusted for inflation) for a new hardwood floor. Not mentioned is the labor as well.