Stairs & Trim in Katy, TX

Before it was Katy, this stretch of prairie was called Cane Island, after a branch of Buffalo Bayou lined with cane. The town was laid out in 1895 and took its name in 1896 from the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad, the K-T. Rice became the crop that mattered. The land is flat and holds water, which suited rice and, much later, suited builders too. J.V. Cardiff is credited with building the first all-concrete rice drier in Texas here, and the 1944 driers are still standing. Rice acreage around Katy peaked above 60,000 acres in the 1970s and has since fallen to around 6,000. The fields became neighborhoods.

That history explains a lot about what we find when we pull up a floor in Katy. The ground is flat Gulf Coast clay, the houses sit on concrete slabs, and the water table is never far down. Expansive clay swells when it is wet and shrinks when it dries, and the Houston area is one of the places where that soil is common. A slab riding on it moves a little with the seasons. Floors have to be chosen and installed with that in mind.

We think about Katy in three bands.

The old town. Old Towne Katy is the part incorporated in 1945, roughly south of Kingsland Boulevard and across I-10 toward Morton Road, with neighborhoods like Pin Oak Village, Cane Island and The Falls at Green Meadows mixed in among older lots. Homes here vary widely in age. On older slabs we spend more time on prep: checking flatness with a straightedge, grinding high spots, filling low ones and looking at how the slab has cracked over the years before anything goes down.

The 1970s and 1980s suburbs. Memorial Parkway, Kelliwood and Nottingham Country were Katy's first big wave of suburban building. Many of these homes have been through several rounds of flooring already, so a project often starts with demolition: old tile, glued-down vinyl, sometimes two layers stacked. These neighborhoods also sit close to Addicks and Barker, the two reservoirs built in the 1940s to keep floodwater out of downtown Houston. During Harvey in 2017, water backed up behind the dams and about 10,000 private properties upstream of them flooded. Pooling behind Barker put water into homes in parts of Kelliwood, Cinco Ranch and Canyon Gate, including houses that had never flooded before. For homes near the reservoirs or in a mapped flood pool, we usually steer people toward waterproof luxury vinyl plank or porcelain tile on the ground floor, and keep wood products upstairs.

The master-planned ring. Green Trails, Grand Lakes, Seven Meadows, Firethorne, Young Ranch and the rest of Greater Katy came after those first suburbs, as the rice land filled in. These homes are usually in good shape structurally, and the floors are the builder's choice: carpet in the living areas and bedrooms, a basic ceramic tile in wet areas. Owners tend to call us when that carpet has worn out, when the kids have gotten older, or when they want one continuous floor across the open kitchen and family room instead of a patchwork. A carpet-to-vinyl-plank changeover in a home like this is one of the most common jobs we do, and in many cases the main living area can be done in a single visit.

A few things hold true across all three bands. On a slab, we lean on engineered hardwood rather than nail-down solid wood, because engineered boards handle humidity and slab movement better. We test slab moisture before installing anything wood-based, and we use a vapor barrier where the product calls for one. For tile, we use a crack isolation membrane, because a slab on clay will move and grout lines will tell on it. And we let wood and laminate acclimate in the house before installation, since Gulf Coast humidity is not something you can ignore.

We don't have a store for you to drive to on a Saturday. We bring the samples to your Katy home, look at the light in your rooms, and measure while we are there. The estimate is free, and it is the only real way to price a job. If you are replacing more than 1,000 square feet, ask about our current $500 offer.