The adjuster wrote the whole dining room off — said 1910 fir like ours "is no longer obtainable". Sable & Sons had three hundred board feet of it in the back of the mill, from the mill. They wove the repair in over two days and the man came back to photograph the seams for his own file.
Services
What runs through the shop
01
Dustless sand & refinish — $4.55 / sq ft
Four cuts from 36 to 120 grit on HEPA extraction, hand edging everywhere a drum cannot reach, then three coats — sealer plus two topcoats, waterborne or oil, same price either way. A whole gorge floor is four to five days.
02
Lay, solid or engineered — from $8.20 / sq ft
Mill-stock fir and oak where the subfloor is sound; engineered with a four-millimetre wear layer where the gorge runs damp. Boards acclimate on site until the meter says the differential is two percent or less.
03
Board-and-batten era repairs — from $23 / board
The old floors were nailed to battens over dirt, and they move like it. We lift, sister in new battens, fasten with screws where the originals let go, and weave matched stock board by board until the plane is flat again.
04
Stairs & nosings — $76 / step
Treads and risers stripped back to matching timber, worn nosings routed out and new hardwood bent or built to the old profile, the first tread your boot finds finished as carefully as the last.
The shop, in figures
What we do
What the gorge asks of us
Containment, taken seriously
The gorge’s houses are small and their owners stay in them while we work. Every machine extracts through HEPA, every doorway is sealed and run at negative air, and the last hour of every day is cleanup — not the last hour of the job.
Metering, twice a day
The river side of the gorge reads eight points wetter than the ridge in spring. Pin meter in the subfloor, pin meter in the boards, both written down morning and evening — the log goes home with the invoice and it is the reason we sleep in July.
Mill-stock matching
When the mill closed we bought the rack. Fir, quartersawn oak and chestnut from buildings that predate the reservoir — the reason an insurer’s "unobtainable" is our Tuesday.
How it goes
Five working days, the gorge sequence
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
Day 0
The measure & the rack
We read the floor and subfloor with the pin meter, crawl the perimeter, and — if repairs are on the card — bring candidate boards from the rack to your hallway to choose against the real thing.
Day 1
Containment & fastening
Barriers up, negative air on, and every loose board screwed to fresh battens where the old ones have let go. Squeaks we find are squeaks we fix; it is on the card, not the extras sheet.
Days 2–3
The dustless cuts
36 to 120 grit, drum and edge, plates on any floor older than the war. Repairs are woven before the second cut so the whole plane finishes as one surface.
Day 4
Sealer & first topcoat
Cut sealer worked in, then the first topcoat of whatever the house and your nose agree on — waterborne as standard, oil-modified if the colour asks for it, priced the same.
Day 5
Final coat & the walkthrough
Last coat, the containment comes down, and we walk the floor together with a lamp held raking across the boards — anything either of us can see gets noted and booked for the follow-up visit, free.
2025 — 2026
Floors the gorge kept
Six from the last year. The fir in three of them was milled a quarter mile from where it now lies — the mill stamp is still on the underside of one board, visible in the cellar.
Word of mouth
The gorge talks back
Third-generation outfit in the best sense: the son runs the meters, the father still cuts the nosings, and the grandson knows where every board in the rack came from. Our floor looks like the house, not like a showroom.
They worked around a night-shift nurse, a newborn and a border collie, one room at a time, and there was genuinely no dust. I checked the top of the door frames with a torch because I did not believe my own shelves.
The batten repair quote was a page long and every line of it made sense — you could see what the money bought. Two firms before them had just written "make good" and shrugged.
Free measure anywhere along the gorge · (555) 026-4471 · mill@sableandsons.example
Bring us the floor nobody will quote
Board-and-batten era, river-damp, "unobtainable" species — the measure is free and the rack is deep. Tell us the address and what the floor has survived. mill@sableandsons.example