Stairs & Trim in Utica, OH

Utica's history is written into its floors. At the turn of the twentieth century this was the largest hand-blown window glass producing town in the United States, because the silica and the natural gas the process needed were both here. The industry died with the 1929 crash and the arrival of new glass-making methods, and the town has been roughly the size it is now ever since — 2,064 people at the 2020 census.

What that leaves is a village where a large share of the houses were built between the 1890s and the 1920s, by people earning glassworks wages. They are frame houses on plank subfloors over joists, and a century of settling means very few of them have a floor that is level within modern tolerance.

That single fact drives most of the decisions here. A rigid-core luxury vinyl plank laid over an old undulating deck bridges the low spots instead of following them, and every bridged spot eventually goes hollow underfoot. The two honest answers are to level the deck properly first or to choose a product that tolerates the variation, and which one is right depends on the room and the budget. What we will not do is lay a rigid floor over a wavy deck and hope.

The other Utica constant is original hardwood. Houses of this vintage often still have it under a carpet somebody fitted in the seventies, and it is worth knowing that before you order a replacement. Refinishing is not work we do, but we will tell you what is down there rather than quietly covering something salvageable.

Stairs in these houses are steep, narrow and rarely square, frequently with a winder at the turn. We measure them individually because there is no reliable way to estimate a staircase like that, and they are the biggest single variable between one quote and another in this village.

Utica is about fifteen miles north of us, an easy run out with samples.