Updates

By Mario Vilchis, owner of Vilchis Hardwood Floors, 237 Obie Dr, Durham, NC 27713 The short answer A Home Depot or Lowe’s installed price and a local Durham crew’s installed price usually land within a dollar or two per square foot of each other. What differs is where the money goes inside that number. A … Big-Box Flooring Installation vs. a Local Durham Crew: Where the Price Difference Actually Goes

By Mario Vilchis, Owner & CEO of Vilchis Hardwood Floors & Tile Every so often I get a call that goes like this. The floor went in six or eight months ago. It looked great. Now there are gaps at the seams you can catch a fingernail in, or the planks have lifted into a … How Long Laminate Should Acclimate in a Durham Home, and What Happens When It Doesn’t

By Mario Vilchis, Owner & CEO of Vilchis Hardwood Floors & Tile People call me about laminate for one reason: they want floors that look like wood without paying wood prices. Then the second sentence out of their mouth is always some version of “so what am I looking at?” I have been installing floors … How Much Does Laminate Flooring Installation Cost in Durham, NC? A 2026 Per-Square-Foot Breakdown

By Mario Vilchis, Owner & CEO of Vilchis Hardwood Floors & Tile A customer showed me a phone photo of a laminate box at an estimate a while back. The box said waterproof in big letters on the front. Her question was simple: does that mean she can put it in the bathroom? The honest … Waterproof vs. Water-Resistant Laminate in Durham, NC: What the Labels Actually Promise

By Mario Vilchis, Owner & CEO of Vilchis Hardwood Floors & Tile This question comes up almost every time we put laminate down on a main floor. The customer looks at the staircase going up out of the room, sees carpet that no longer matches anything, and asks whether we can just keep going. The … Can You Put Laminate on Stairs? What It Costs in Durham and When We’d Talk You Out of It

The worst version of this project goes like this. Somebody buys a condo off Six Forks, hires a flooring crew, has beautiful new LVP down by Friday, and gets a letter from the management company three weeks later telling them to take it out. That happens. Not often, but often enough that we ask about … Flooring a North Hills condo or townhome: HOA rules, sound underlayment, and what gets rejected

Homeowners ask us this in one of two ways. Either “we’re listing in the spring, should we do the floors first,” or the version we hear more often, which is someone standing in their living room a week before photos, quietly panicking. The honest answer is that it depends less on flooring than people expect … Do new floors pay off when you sell in Raleigh? What we see in Five Points, North Hills, and Brier Creek

Written by Mario Vilchis, owner of Vilchis Hardwood Floors & Tile in Durham, NC. I have been installing floors and tile across the Triangle since 2009. A customer in an older part of Durham called me a few months back about a bathroom floor another crew had finished. Nice tile. 12×24 porcelain, the gray woodgrain … Large-format tile in older Durham homes: why lippage happens and how we prevent it

We get called out to Brier Creek a lot, and a good share of those calls start the same way. Somebody wants solid oak in the main living area. They have already picked a species. Sometimes they have already bought the wood. Then I look at the foundation and have to tell them the thing … Brier Creek slab homes: why solid hardwood fails here and what we install instead

By Mario Vilchis, owner, Vilchis Hardwood Floors & Tile Most flooring articles tell you a whole-house job takes “about a week.” That number is useless, and I say that as someone who has quoted a lot of whole-house jobs. It depends on whether you are refinishing or replacing, whether the subfloor cooperates, and how many … Whole-house flooring in a 2,200 sq ft Durham home: a day-by-day job log