Flooring in Georgetown, and What Sits Under It

Two Georgetowns, two flooring problems

Georgetown is the most split personality on this list, and both halves generate real work.

There is Old Town, arranged around what is generally reckoned one of the best-preserved Victorian courthouse squares in Texas — 1880s to 1930s houses, pier and beam, and a genuine chance of original longleaf pine under carpet or sheet vinyl.

And there is everything since 1995, dominated by Sun City, which is one of the largest active-adult communities in the state and has an entirely different set of flooring priorities.

Almost nothing we would say about one applies to the other.

Sun City, and specifying for how a floor is used

Sun City is single-level living by design, and that changes the flooring conversation in ways worth naming directly rather than dancing around.

Transitions matter more than anywhere else we work. A quarter-inch lip at a doorway that nobody in a 2010 Hutto house would ever notice is a genuine trip hazard here. We detail transitions flush wherever the substrate allows it, and where a height change is unavoidable we use a compliant bevel rather than a trim strip that happens to fit.

Slip resistance is a specification, not a feature. In wet rooms, tile gets chosen against a wet dynamic coefficient of friction rather than against how a sample feels dry in a showroom, because those two things are unrelated and only one of them matters at 6am.

Underfoot comfort is a real requirement. A rigid-core plank glued hard to a slab is unforgiving to stand on for a long time. In kitchens especially, an attached pad or a floating construction changes how a floor feels through an hour of cooking, and it is worth more than the specification sheet suggests.

Dust and disruption. Sun City residents are frequently home all day, which changes how a job is sequenced. We plan around that rather than assuming an empty house.

Sun City’s housing also runs from the mid-1990s through current construction, so the older phases are now well into the builder-carpet replacement cycle that runs through the whole corridor.

Old Town, and what is under the carpet

Around the square, the housing is old enough to be worth investigating before it is replaced.

Original longleaf pine under later flooring is a real possibility in these houses, and restoring it is usually both cheaper and better than putting anything new down. Pine of that age is denser and more resinous than modern timber, it burnishes if worked at modern-floor speed, and being pre-1978 it brings the EPA lead rule into scope when an original coating is disturbed.

The crawl space is part of the job here too. Ground cover and ventilation under the house set the moisture content of the subfloor, and that decides whether the boards cup through a wet spring.

Limestone, karst and hard water

Georgetown sits on the Edwards limestone with mapped karst through the western half — Inner Space Cavern, discovered during highway construction, is the visible end of it.

For flooring that means slabs are stable and rarely move, so a floor out of level here has almost always been that way since it was poured. Grinding corrects it permanently. Where a slab was placed over fill that later settled into a void, you get a localised dip in an otherwise sound house, which reads as a foundation problem and is not one.

The same limestone produces very hard municipal water. On polished stone and large-format porcelain that leaves a dissolved-mineral film which reads as haze rather than dirt, and mopping with more of the same water makes it worse. It is a cleaning-method issue and we cover it at handover, because “my new floor looks dull” three months in is an avoidable conversation.