Stairs & Trim in Sugar Land, TX

The name is literal. Colonel E. H. Cunningham built a sugar refinery here on the Brazos floodplain in 1879, and in 1908 the Kempner family and Logan Copenhaver formed Imperial Sugar. For roughly half a century the company owned the town. Sugar Land became a general-law city in 1959, adopted a home-rule charter in 1981, and grew to 111,026 people by the 2020 census. The old refinery and its 1920s char house still stand, a short drive from the city's newer landmarks: Sugar Land Town Square, the 6,400-seat Smart Financial Centre, and Constellation Field.

What makes Sugar Land unusual for a flooring installer is how neatly its housing is sorted by decade. The city counts thirteen master-planned communities within its limits and extraterritorial jurisdiction, and each one went up in a fairly distinct window. That gives us a quick way to think about a house before we arrive.

Sugar Creek, from the 1960s and 1970s. This was Sugar Land's first master-planned community, with custom homes and golf course lots. These are the oldest homes we see in the city, and many have been remodeled more than once. Expect layered flooring, older trim that may not match from room to room, and a slab that has had decades to settle. Removal and careful slab prep matter most here.

First Colony, from 1976 into the 1990s. Sugarland Properties, a venture of Gerald D. Hines Interests, began building on about 9,700 acres in the mid-1970s, and the city annexed its utility districts through the 1990s. The result is 98 neighborhoods, including Sweetwater around its country club and Colony Park, with most homes built from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Homes of that age often still have their second set of floors: 1990s ceramic tile on the diagonal, carpet in formal rooms that nobody uses formally anymore. The usual project is opening the downstairs up with one continuous floor.

Commonwealth, Greatwood and New Territory, 1980s to early 2000s. Commonwealth's larger custom homes date from the 1980s and 1990s; Greatwood and New Territory filled in through the 1990s and early 2000s and were annexed in December 2017. Big two-story plans mean a lot of stairs, and stairs are one of the most common things we redo, either carpet to wood treads or a fresh run of carpet.

Avalon, Riverstone and Telfair, 1999 and later. Avalon began in 1999 and Riverstone in 2001. Telfair is the newest of the group, built by Newland on the land of the former Central Unit prison farm, with homes starting in 2006; the old Two Camp building there now houses the Houston Museum of Natural Science at Sugar Land. These homes have flat modern slabs and builder flooring that owners are now ready to move past.

The ground under all of it. Sugar Land is sinking. The land is subsiding by 10 to 25 millimeters a year, enough that the Fort Bend Subsidence District was created in 1989, and subsidence made Harvey's flooding worse than it would otherwise have been. In 2017 most of the city's flooding was in the southern part of Levee Improvement District 2, and roughly 250 to 260 homes were damaged. Add the shrink-swell clay common across the Houston area and you get slabs that move. That is why we use crack isolation under tile, prefer floating floors and engineered hardwood over rigid installs on concrete, and point homeowners in lower areas toward waterproof luxury vinyl plank.

How it works with us. There is no store to drive to. We bring samples to your home, measure every room, and give you a clear written quote. The estimate is free, and our installation workmanship is covered by our Lifetime Installation Guarantee. We're an installation company, so if you were hoping to bring an old floor back to life rather than replace it, we will tell you that plainly. Call (346) 396-6398.