Luxury Vinyl Plank in Richmond, TX

Richmond is home for us. Our office is at 8315 FM 723, and a lot of the floors we install are a short drive from it. So this page is less of a pitch and more of a field guide to the town as we see it from the inside of people's homes.

The town started with the river. In 1822 a group of Stephen F. Austin's colonists built a log fort at a bend in the Brazos, and the settlement around it became known as Fort Bend. Robert Eden Handy and William Lusk laid out a town in 1837 and named it after Richmond, England. The Republic of Texas incorporated it that May, and in December it became the seat of the new Fort Bend County. The railroad arrived in 1855. Jane Long and Mirabeau Lamar are buried here, and the Fort Bend Museum still tells the story from downtown.

Walk downtown and you can see layers of that history. The Classical Revival courthouse had its cornerstone laid in July 1908 and is still a working courthouse. Decker Park, next to it, holds a 1901 railroad depot, the McNabb House from the 1850s, an 1896 county jail and a log replica of the original fort. Out on FM 762, George Ranch Historical Park sits on land first settled in 1824 by Henry and Nancy Jones.

That is the postcard version. Here is what it means for floors.

The older Richmond. Neighborhoods such as Winston Terrace, where the first houses were built in 1940, and Hillcrest hold some of the oldest homes we work in. Richmond's population grew from 2,026 in 1950 to 9,692 in 1980 as people moved out for Houston jobs, and a good share of the in-town housing dates from those decades. In homes this age we usually find more than one floor stacked on another: vinyl under carpet, tile over an older tile, glue that has outlived three owners. Getting all of that up and getting the slab flat and clean is half the job. Rooms are often a little out of square, and door casings and baseboards were cut for floors of a different height, so trim and transitions take real attention. We plan that before we quote, not after the old floor is in the dumpster.

The newer Richmond. The Grand Parkway opened up the land outside the old town, and master-planned communities filled it. Harvest Green, which Johnson Development built around a working farm of about 12 acres, welcomed its first buyers in 2015 and is now close to built out. Veranda, another Johnson community near Williams Way and US 59, broke ground in 2016 on about 590 acres. Aliana and Pecan Grove round out the picture. These homes are on modern, flat slabs, which makes installation faster. The common call from these neighborhoods is about the builder package: thin carpet in bedrooms, small tile in wet areas, and a buyer who now wants one continuous floor through the downstairs. We see a lot of carpet coming out and luxury vinyl plank going in, often in a single visit, and plenty of stairs being switched from carpet to wood treads or the reverse.

The river. Richmond's relationship with the Brazos is not abstract. The river set a record crest of 54.7 feet at the Richmond gauge in 2016, and during Harvey in 2017 it went higher, with officials barricading neighborhoods along its banks and ordering evacuations. If your home sits near the river or in a lower part of town, that history belongs in the flooring conversation. Waterproof LVP and porcelain tile handle a wet event far better than wood or laminate. If water has ever come in, we will also talk about whether the slab has dried properly before anything new goes down.

The ground. Much of the Houston area sits on Beaumont Formation clays, and a large share of those clays shrink and swell as their moisture changes. Slab floors feel that movement first. For tile, we use crack isolation membranes so small slab movement does not telegraph through the grout. For wood looks, we lean on engineered hardwood and floating floors, which forgive movement better than a rigid installation. Solid nail-down wood on a slab is rarely the right call here.

How we work in Richmond. There is no showroom to drive to. We bring the samples to your home, look at them in your light next to your cabinets, and measure while we are there. Estimates are free and booked Monday through Saturday. Jose grew up in this trade working beside his father, and the company is still family-run. Our installation workmanship is backed by our Lifetime Installation Guarantee. Since Richmond is our home base, it is also the easiest place for us to fit you in quickly. Call (346) 396-6398 and we will set a time.