Stairs & Trim in Thornville, OH

Thornville was laid out around 1811 under the name Lebanon and has been Thornville since its post office opened in 1820. It is a compact village — 0.53 square miles, 1,087 people at the 2020 census, up 9.7% on 2010 — sitting about twenty miles north of the Perry County seat at New Lexington and a short drive south of Buckeye Lake.

Being the only Perry County town we cover does not change how we work, but the housing mix here does. There is genuinely old village stock around the center, on plank subfloors over long-settled joists, and there is a band of property closer to the lake that was built or adapted as recreational housing. Those are two different flooring problems and they need to be told apart before anything is specified.

The lake-adjacent houses carry the same conditions as the ones on the Licking County shore: shallow crawl spaces, light original construction, and moisture readings that run higher than they would inland. We test the subfloor and, where there is one, the slab before choosing anything. A high reading points at luxury vinyl plank with the right underlayment rather than solid hardwood, and that is a decision better made with a meter than with optimism.

The village houses are about level and layers. Two centuries of settling means the deck is rarely flat within modern tolerance, and generations of flooring laid over one another mean the finished height has crept up, so casings and door bottoms need dealing with when it comes out.

Legend Valley on the edge of the village brings large crowds in for festivals through the season, which is worth knowing when we schedule — we would rather plan a delivery around a festival weekend than have a truck stuck on Route 204.

Thornville is roughly nine miles from us, an easy trip out with samples and an easy one to repeat if a floor ever needs attention.