Stairs & Trim in Spring Branch, TX

Long Point Road tells most of the Spring Branch story if you drive it end to end. The area's earliest known settler, Karl Kolbe, arrived from Germany in 1830, and the community that grew up here was religious, German and agricultural, with plenty of dairies. St. Peter's United Church opened in 1848 on land the Bauer family donated, and the school society it sponsored in 1856 eventually became Spring Branch ISD. Hillendahl Cemetery, a designated historic cemetery, still sits in a shopping center parking lot. Houston annexed the eastern part in the 1940s and the western part in the 1950s, after a push to make Spring Branch its own city failed and the Memorial villages formed instead.

For a long time after that, Spring Branch kept a rural edge. Apartment complexes arrived around the 1970s, and from the 1980s through the 2000s many Central American and Korean families moved in, and a Koreatown grew up. By 2007 older houses were being torn down and replaced with newer homes, and by 2013 Houstonia was calling Spring Branch one of the city's hottest neighborhoods. In one week in August 2019, local reporting noted a concentration of teardowns in the Spring Branch area.

That leaves two very different houses on a lot of Spring Branch streets, and they need different flooring plans.

If you are keeping the ranch house

Spring Branch West has many 1960s ranch-style homes, and the east side has older bungalows. These houses have been lived in for a long time, and their floors often show it in layers: carpet over old vinyl, tile set over tile, glue left from something long gone. A good project here starts with demolition and slab prep. We take the old layers out, scrape and grind the adhesive, look at how the slab has cracked over sixty years of clay soil swelling and shrinking under it, and flatten it before the new floor goes down. Skipping that step is how a new floor ends up hollow, uneven or cracked within a couple of years.

Older ranch homes also tend to have rooms that are not perfectly square, low thresholds, and doorways that were built for thinner floors. We plan transitions, undercut door jambs where needed, and install new baseboard and quarter round so the finished room looks intentional rather than patched together.

For material, luxury vinyl plank is the most common choice in a ranch house we are keeping. It is waterproof, it floats over a slab that may still move a little, and it suits the single-level, open-to-the-yard way these houses are lived in. Engineered hardwood is the wood option if you want real wood on a slab. Porcelain tile over a crack isolation membrane works well in kitchens and baths.

If the house next door is new

New construction in Spring Branch usually means a taller house on the same lot, with a flat new slab and a builder or owner who wants a premium finish. Engineered hardwood through the main level, tile in the wet areas, and matching treads up the stairs are typical requests. On new concrete, we always test moisture before installing anything wood-based.

What every Spring Branch job has in common

Several bayous run through the area, including Spring Branch and Brickhouse Gully, both draining toward Buffalo Bayou. Houston humidity is constant. Wood and laminate acclimate in the house before installation, and ground-floor rooms that see water get waterproof floors.

We don't have a store on Long Point or anywhere else. We bring the samples to your house, measure while we are there, and give you a free in-home estimate. If your project tops 1,000 square feet, ask about our current $500 offer.