Eden Prairie Wood Flooring has spent more than twenty years installing, sanding and finishing wood flooring in Edina, in a housing stock that runs from custom-built prewar houses to tract construction four decades newer. The species on the floor matters less to how a job goes than what sits under it and how the house has been heated since it was framed.
Our first visit is a measuring visit. We read the indoor relative humidity and write the number down, then take moisture content readings on the flooring and on the subfloor and compare them to each other rather than to a rule of thumb. Both numbers go on the paperwork before anyone talks about a start date, because a heated Minnesota house in January sits below the band wood flooring is specified for.
What you get back is a quote you can check the work against: a written grit sequence, the finish schedule, and cure and return-to-service times that account for what a cold house does to them. We also plan where the furniture, the pets and the sleeping arrangements go before the first machine runs, which is the part most people find out about late.
Two documented prewar districts inside a mostly postwar city
Edina reads as an old suburb because its two best-known residential districts were platted before the war, but the numbers describe a different city. Of 24,071 housing units, 30.6 percent were built before 1960 and 7.8 percent in 1939 or earlier; the other 69.4 percent postdates 1960, and the single largest build decade is the 1970s at 20.3 percent. Treating every Edina address as a prewar house is the fastest way to quote the wrong job.
The Country Club District, platted 1924 to 1931
Thorpe Brothers Realty Company platted the Country Club District in 1924, on ground bounded by Minnehaha Creek, Sunnyside Road, Arden Avenue and West 50th Street, and it holds roughly 555 dwellings and a city park. Most of its structures went up between 1924 and 1931, in Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, Georgian Revival and Mediterranean Revival designs, with the original model homes built as English Tudor, French Provincial and American Colonial Revival.
Under those floors we expect narrow strip red oak or white oak laid over plank or early plywood subfloor, site-finished in place, and sanded some unknown number of times in the century since. That history is the whole job on these houses. What is left above the tongue decides whether we are refinishing a floor or replacing parts of one.
Morningside, platted from 1905 along the streetcar line
Morningside was platted in 1905 by the children of Jonathan Grimes and built out along the Como-Harriet streetcar line roughly through 1936, as several hundred single-family homes that are predominantly bungalows. It seceded from Edina in 1920, was reincorporated in 1966, and still carries ZIP code 55416.
Bungalow floor plans change the work more than the age does. Rooms are smaller and doorways more frequent, so a Morningside refinish is a job of many thresholds, tight edger work in corners and closets, and stair treads and nosings that have to come out looking like the field floor rather than close to it.
The postwar majority, and why it is a different quote
A 1970s house in Edina is a plywood or OSB subfloor, often with carpet history, and it is the one where questions about squeaks, nail pops and subfloor screw-down come up before anything about species. 68.1 percent of the city’s units were built before 1980 and 16.9 percent in 2000 or later, so a single street can hold three different construction eras. We quote each from what the meter and the fastener pattern say, not from the decade the house was built in.
Looking for wood-flooring closer to Minnetonka? See Wood-Flooring in Minnetonka.
What heritage designation reaches, and what it leaves alone
Edina Heritage Landmark designation is a zoning classification, and significant exterior modifications to a designated property require approval from the Edina Heritage Preservation Commission, following the plan of treatment developed for that property. The Country Club District carries that landmark designation and is also a National Register historic district.
Inside the district, a certificate of appropriateness is required for any work where a city permit is required for the demolition and new construction of a principal dwelling or a detached garage, and for significant structural changes to street-facing facades. Every one of those triggers points outward, at the building envelope and the streetscape.
The floor is the owner’s decision
Sanding, refinishing, replacing boards or putting down an entirely different floor are not exterior modifications, and the commission’s review does not extend to them. Homeowners in the district regularly ask us whether they need to go before a board to change a floor. They do not, and that is worth knowing before a project stalls waiting for a meeting date that was never required.
What the district does change is the house itself rather than the paperwork. Rooms in a 1924 to 1931 house are laid out around load-bearing walls that have not moved, plaster that does not tolerate vibration well, and stairs that are part of the original construction. We plan machine routes, dust containment and where the equipment is staged around that, which is a building question rather than a review question.
Permit posture on interior finish work
Minnesota Rules 1300.0120, subpart 4, item A, sub-item (8) exempts finish work — “painting, papering, tiling, carpeting, cabinets, countertops, and similar finish work” — from a building permit. The exemption is narrow in one specific way: it does not authorize work that violates the code or any other ordinance.
That distinction matters when the floor is not really the job. Sistering a joist, replacing a section of subfloor or cutting into structure is a different conversation, and the reference is the Minnesota State Building Code as adopted and administered by the City of Edina. We say which category a job falls into when we quote it, rather than after the boards come up.
Original oak in a 1920s house, and how much of it is left
On a floor laid in the 1920s, the number that decides the project is the thickness remaining above the tongue. Previous sandings, deep edger work along one wall and cumulative overwood at butt joints all subtract from it, and none of that is visible under a worn finish. We measure before we quote, because a sand-through halfway across a dining room is not a repair anyone enjoys paying for.
When a recoat is the honest answer
A finish that is worn but not worn through is a screen-and-recoat, not a full sand, and it costs a fraction of one. We quote the two against each other and say plainly when the cheaper answer is the right one, including on floors we would personally rather resand. On engineered floors the same discipline applies to the wear layer: past a certain thickness there is nothing left to sand, and we measure it before a refinish is ever priced.
Timing matters as much as the method here. A floor caught inside its recoat window takes a buff and coat; the same floor two winters later, with the finish worn into the wood at the traffic lanes, takes the full 36-50-80 grit sequence and a drum sander. We tell you which window a floor is in and what the difference costs before the decision is yours to make.
Pre-1978 houses and the federal lead rule
Both prewar districts, and a good deal of what was built in the decades after them, sit on the old side of 1978, where the U.S. EPA Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule at 40 CFR Part 745, Subpart E governs work that disturbs painted surfaces. Minnesota is not an EPA-authorized RRP state, so the federal rule applies directly rather than through a state program.
Floor sanding runs an edger and a buffer straight into painted base shoe, casings and stair risers, which is exactly where that rule becomes relevant on an interior job. How a contractor plans for it — what comes off first, what gets contained, whether a HEPA-shrouded sander and dustless sanding setup is on the truck — is a fair question to ask before hiring anyone in a prewar Edina house.
Matching a floor in a house where the millwork was custom
Matching is harder in a 1920s house than in a new one because nothing was ordered from a catalog. Board widths, the cut of the wood and the way it was graded vary house to house, and a modern board set beside them is usually the wrong width before it is the wrong color.
Weaving into what is already there
A patch reads as a patch when it is laid in as a block. We weave new boards into the field with staggered joints, use a dutchman patch where a single defect does not justify pulling a run, and lace a doorway so the eye follows the boards rather than the seam. Red oak and white oak take stain differently enough that guessing between them shows up after the first coat, so we identify the species and the cut — plainsawn, rift-sawn or quartersawn — before ordering anything.
Winter gapping, before anyone calls it a defect
Wood flooring is specified for a thirty to fifty percent relative humidity band, and a Minnesota house in a January cold snap does not hold it. The result is seasonal gapping, and sometimes dry cupping, on floors that are behaving exactly as wood behaves. We measure and photograph it before it gets called a defect, because a good share of it closes again by June.
The fix is usually a humidifier, and that is where we have a conversation instead of handing over a setting. Pushing indoor humidity up to suit the floor can put condensation on the windows of an older house, and a humidistat set without that discussion trades one problem for another. We say up front where the practical compromise sits for your house.
Lower levels, slabs and what gets read
Edina’s older houses and its 1970s ones both have finished lower levels, and a below-grade floor is quoted from a reading taken on that slab, never from the floor above it. A calcium chloride test or an ASTM F2170 in-situ relative humidity probe gives us the number, and the vapor retarder and its perm rating get specified to it.
That reading also settles the format. It decides between a nail-down floor over a subfloor system, a glue-down with a compatible moisture control layer, and an engineered floor built for the condition, and it is the one measurement that keeps a below-grade installation from becoming a warranty conversation two heating seasons later.
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