Pete's Hardwood Floors, Inc.

01/16/2025

10/03/2023

Well, sander friends. It’s come to this. Pete’s 25-year run of helping hardwood floor DIYers has reached its end. It is with great sadness that we announce that we will be closing our rental and sales storefront, as well as our ecommerce site. The combined effects of post-COVID malaise, inflation, high interest rates, inventory shortages, and a populace increasingly reluctant to sand their own floors have shrunk our business beyond sustainability. The retail side has been listed for sale since the summer, to no avail.
Effective October 1, we will discontinue all rentals. We will remain open with limited hours through November 1 to liquidate our remaining inventory and rental equipment. So, if you’ve ever dreamed of owning your own sander, or starting a sanding empire of your own this could be your moment.
However, if you would like to hire someone to sand your floors for you, our contracting side will continue, proud and uninterrupted, under the Pete’s name.
Feel free to stop by in the next month to help with our “everything must go” stage, or simply to say goodbye and let us thank you for being our customers. We appreciate all of your floors and stories more than you could ever know.

07/25/2023

Patching. It's a tricky business sure, but it's hard to believe it could go THIS wrong.
A customer initially considered buying reclaimed birch from Pete's to DIY some board replacement, but let a contractor handle it instead. The contractor used new maple in the patched areas, which left them bright white against the older birch. The customer, rightly, complained to the company about the poorly matching patches. The final photo was their idea of a "solution." The horror.

07/20/2023

Sorry for not posting an answer yesterday - we were really enjoying all your theories! Here's our explanation of what we think happened.

The floor had been successfully coated with one layer of waterborne sealer. The opaque, dusty material started to appear at the end of the first gallon of topcoat. Only one gallon was used for about 700sqft, so the spread rate was high. And we noticed that the floor coated at the "beginning" of the gallon showed no whiteness at all, but it was GLOSSY. Bingo. The coater admitted they had not stirred or even agitated the gallon of polyurethane, which was a modern matte finish, chock full of silica flatteners. So, this last room was coated with the dregs of the gallon, when it was down to just solids and flattening agents. We can't imagine how it even flowed enough to apply!
How was it fixed? It took a combination of a 60grit screen on a 16" buffer, plus hand-scraping around the edges where it was thickest.
The moral of this story: stir your polyurethane.

07/19/2023

This was the most mysterious and confounding set of photos we had ever received. It still makes us queasy to look at them. We figured out what happened, but it took an hour of crawling over the floor. Can you explain what caused this? We'll listen to your theories, then give you the answer tomorrow.

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07/15/2023

Look what a customer made for us! It's a whole sample board of Rubio on Ash which is not a common flooring wood, but super-popular with our furniture and cabinet-building clients. A treasure.

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07/12/2023

We thought about tagging the satan guy as Dome Hepot, but that would have been wrong.

05/13/2023

So, we’re a little slow- it takes us time to digest new ideas- but we’ve collected our thoughts on our trip to Milwaukee for the 2023 National Wood Flooring Association Expo. Or stop by the store and we’ll talk your ear off!

05/03/2023

Learning new Rubio Monocoat tricks at the NWFA trade show!

04/15/2023

White lines all around the edges of floor boards usually indicate water troubles. If there isn't a leak, the most common wood floor water catastrophes are caused by steam or carpet cleaners. Please don't use them on your wood floors. Not ever. Just stop.

03/25/2023

Should hardwood floor repairs be invisible? It is difficult to make repairs seamless, especially in older floors where the wood has changed or may no longer be available. So, embrace the difference! Perfect repairs are boring. Put your carpentry and parquetry skills to use and turn that humble patch into a feature.

03/19/2023

Sometimes you pop back to the shop to help a customer out on a Sunday morning. And pften that customer is so classy, they bring you a fabulous pastry!
I love owning a small business.