A repair is worth doing when the damage is contained, the material can be matched and the cause has been dealt with. Once the damaged area spreads past a few square metres, once the product is discontinued with no spare boxes anywhere in the house, or once the substrate underneath has moved, a patch becomes the more expensive route to a worse-looking floor. Where that is the case we price the replacement instead and say why.
Canadian dollar planning ranges for installed work. These are budgeting figures, not quotes. Repairs are priced by the job, but the scope usually borrows from these.
$1-$3 per sq ft
Lifting and disposing of damaged material where a section has to come out before anything new goes down.
$2-$6 per sq ft
Self-levelling compound where the substrate under a repair is out of flat or a slab has moved.
$3-$7 per sq ft
Full sanding and refinishing where a board repair has to blend into an existing wood floor.
$3-$8 per sq ft
Carpet and underpad range where a room ends up being redone rather than patched.
Flooring Experts Calgary takes floor repair enquiries in Calgary for every material in a house, and the first task on any of them is triage rather than carpentry.
Three questions do most of the work. How large is the damaged area relative to the room? Is matching material available, either as leftover stock or as a product still in production? And has whatever caused the damage actually stopped?
A contained area, available material and a resolved cause make a repair straightforward and clearly worth doing. Lose any one of the three and the maths changes. Once damage runs across more than a small share of a room, or once a discontinued product means the patch will never blend, replacing the room tends to produce a better floor for less money than a run of visible repairs.
Click-together plank can often have a single board swapped where the damage is isolated and spare stock exists. Glued-down plank and sheet vinyl get cut out and patched, and the seam is the giveaway. Deep gouges and heat damage do not fill convincingly in either.
Laminate is the least forgiving material in the house. The core is fibreboard, so once water has swollen an edge that board is finished and no repair recovers it. Planks can be replaced individually, and seams that lift or click usually point at a failed locking profile or a floor with nowhere left to expand.
A single cracked tile comes out and goes back with little disruption when spares exist. Grout can be raked out and replaced. Tiles that sound hollow point at a bond failure below, and a crack running in a straight line across several tiles is not a tile problem at all.
Burns, tears and pet damage are cut out and patched with donor carpet. Ripples and waves are not damage at all, they are a tension problem. Both are fixable; they are simply different jobs with different tools.
Boards can be lifted and replaced one at a time. The constraint is matching species, width, thickness and profile, and then blending new finish into an aged floor.
Almost every failed repair we get called back to look at was done over a live cause.
The Calgary condition that produces the most of them is a moving slab. Expansive clay is widespread across the region, and forensic engineering sources note that basement floor slabs are affected by clay movement to a far greater degree than footings, so heaved and cracked slabs are much more common here than actual foundation damage. A crack running in a straight line through several basement tiles, or a ridge in basement vinyl that returns after it is flattened, is the slab talking. Tile replaced over that cracks again along the same line.
Water is the second. A repair over an unresolved supply line, appliance drain or window well simply resets the clock, and the second round of damage is usually larger than the first.
Expansion is the third. Floating floors need a perimeter gap, and when trim, a heavy cabinet or a tightly fitted transition takes that gap away, the floor buckles or opens at a seam somewhere in the middle of the room. Replace the buckled board without restoring the gap and you get the same result again.
So we find the source, name it, and quote the flooring around it. Where the cause sits outside flooring, such as plumbing, structure or drainage, it goes to the trade that owns it before the floor is touched.
Three things decide it: how much of the room is affected, whether matching material exists, and whether the cause has stopped. All three in your favour makes a repair straightforward. Lose one and the answer usually moves toward replacing the room, because a visible patch in a floor you look at every day is a poor result at any price.
Sometimes. If the product is still in production we can chase a matching box, though dye lots and wear will differ. If it is discontinued, the usual approach is to take donor material from a closet, under an appliance or another low-visibility area and put the closest available match into that spot instead. That trade-off should be a decision you make, not one we make for you.
Yes, and most repair work is exactly that. We do need to know as much as you can tell us about the original installation: the product if you have it, roughly when it went in, and whether anything was done to the subfloor. Where nothing is known, we work it out on site before quoting.
It usually means the bond between the tile and the substrate has failed under those tiles. They may not have cracked yet, but they are likely to. The relevant question is why the bond failed. Poor coverage of the setting material, movement underneath or moisture all matter, because replacing hollow tiles without answering it produces the same outcome again.
Yes, and it arrives sooner than people expect. Repairs carry a fixed amount of set-up, matching and finishing effort regardless of size. Once you are into several separate patches in one room, or into levelling the substrate beneath them, a fresh floor over a prepared base is frequently cheaper and always looks better.
Repairs are priced by the job because the variables are the material, the access and the cause rather than the area. What we can publish are the planning ranges the scope borrows from: removal about $1 to $3 per square foot, levelling about $2 to $6, hardwood refinishing about $3 to $7 and carpet about $3 to $8. Those are Canadian dollar planning ranges, not quotes.