Stairs & Trim in Bexley, OH

Bexley formed as a village in 1908 out of two merged neighborhoods and became a city on 1 January 1932, which puts almost all of its original housing in the first third of the twentieth century. The 2020 census counted 13,928 residents, and the city divides cleanly into three: North Bexley with its large, mansion-like homes and estates including the Ohio Governor's Residence, Central Bexley at roughly 2,000 to 4,500 square feet, and South Bexley where many houses are under 1,500.

Those three bands need three approaches. In the large North Bexley properties, the flooring is part of the architecture — long sightlines, original trim, staircases with returns and winders that have to be scribed on site. Plank width, species and sheen matter here in a way they do not in a new build, because the room already has a period language and a floor either speaks it or argues with it.

In Central and South Bexley the houses are still pre-war and behave that way structurally. Plank subfloors over joists that have had a century to settle, floors out of level by enough to matter to a rigid-core product, and original hardwood under carpet more often than not. We will tell you when that original floor is worth keeping. Refinishing is not work we do, but you should get to make that decision knowing what is down there.

Smaller houses also reward continuity. Where a compact plan changes flooring at every doorway it feels chopped up; one product carried through the living space and proper transitions where it genuinely has to change makes the same square footage read considerably larger.

Capital University and Trinity Lutheran Seminary put rental property into the mix alongside owner-occupied family homes. The right specification for a student let is not the right specification for a house someone means to stay in for twenty years, and we are happy to say plainly which is which.

We bring the showroom to you in Bexley. Samples come to the house — in rooms with this much original character, judging a floor anywhere else is guesswork — and we measure and price the whole project in the same visit.