The Best Time to Add Hardwood Flooring During You Home Remodeling Project

A big remodeling project requires multiple steps and varying degrees of dust and debris, so how do you decide the order in which each element of the project should be completed? To help handle the chaos, the experts at Luxury Wood NYC have a few tips on how to tackle your remodeling timeline.

First Things First

Where to start is often the easiest piece of the puzzle to solve. For example, if the project involves demolition, it is obvious that this should be the first thing to accomplish. Tearing down a wall or removing cabinets in a kitchen are jobs that are going to be messy. After that, the sequence of events gets a little more confusing. To answer questions about the timeline of a project, let us create a sample scenario:

Kitchen/Dining Room Remodeling Timeline

You have decided to remodel the kitchen and adjoining dining room, a project that will require tearing out the kitchen floor, cabinets, and countertops along with removing the existing dining room carpeting, adding new hardwood flooring in both rooms, and repainting the rooms. Here is the ideal remodeling project timeline for this scenario:

1. Remove kitchen countertops and cabinetry – This is one of the messiest parts of the project, and it is necessary to get them out of the room first if the existing floor runs underneath them.

2. Remove the existing kitchen floor, revealing the sub-flooring.

3. Remove dining room carpeting.

4. Paint both rooms – It is best to paint before installing new cabinets and countertops to avoid the need to cover them for painting.

5. Install new cabinets and countertops.

6. Last, but not least, have hardwood flooring installed and finished.

Why Wait to Install Your Hardwood Floors? In almost any case, it is wise to wait until the end of the project to install and finish your hardwood floors. The most important reasons for waiting are:

1. Installing your new hardwood floors at the end of the project prevents damage from dust and debris or carpenters and other workers.

2. Once a new hardwood floor is finished, you will have to wait at least 30 days (about 4 and a half weeks) before laying anything like a protective painter’s tarp on top of them or you will risk “suffocating” the finish. It is also difficult and expensive to repair damage to a new finish, and there is no saying if the repair will end up looking different from the rest of the floor!

With that being said, the need for small touch-ups is common after any remodeling project, however, you can avoid any major snafus by leaving the hardwood flooring part of the project for last. Not only will your project timeline be shorter, but this can also save you money!