Utah History (Hardwood Floors)

Just recently I had the opportunity to attend an open house of my grandparent’s home at 464 Harvard Avenue. The new owners had made lots of changes to the property. It was fun to see the improvements and also reminisce about how the home looked when I was growing up. I remember that my grandparent’s had the prettiest carpet. It was a pattern of roses woven on a golden background. I am sure it was wool. Their carpet lasted forever! I remember them re-carpeting the home once and they lived there for 42 years. They chose the same carpet again even when the current style was long shag. At the open house all the rose carpeting was gone and the new owners had refinished the original 1915 hardwood floors. I didn’t even know that the home had hardwood flooring!

It made me wonder how many homes in Utah have hardwood flooring. So I started my digging for information. My first call was to my flooring specialist, Kim Larsen with Carpet Giant Carpet One. She has been selling all types of flooring for 38 years. I asked her about when and why the trends changed in flooring. She told me that in the late 1960’s that the building code changed. Prior to about 1968 it was CODE that every home had to have hardwood floors! I was floored…(joke intended)! I don’t know why it was code, but it might have been because carpet wasn’t really cheap prior to then. Carpet was wool and not usually wall to wall. It changed when nylon and polyester carpeting became available. In the 1960’s nylon was stronger and more durable and was generally in a popcorn stitch (imagine Berber style) and polyester was the exciting SHAG of the ’60’s!

Everyone wanted shag partly because of the style and partly because it was so much cheaper! In fact, many builders in the mid 1960’s would put in the hardwood floors because of the building code, but wouldn’t sand and finish them. It cost approximately $2.75 per sq ft to sand and finish the hardwood floors and it was cheaper to buy carpet and have it installed than the cost of the finishing the hardwoods. So the builder would leave them unfinished and carpet over the top! Almost all of those hardwood floors are 2″ red oak. The crazy thing is that the desire for polyester carpeting raged even through the oil crisis in the 1970’s. People were willing to pay more to get their shag carpet!

The next step I took was to look up houses built prior to 1970 on our multiple listings service. A home with carpet over hardwood may not indicate that it has hardwood flooring at all. Even with that reduction I found out that 56% of all homes sold that were built prior to 1970 have hardwood listed as a type of flooring. After the building code changed, from 1970-1990 there was a reduction of hardwood installed in homes. Only 22% have hardwood flooring. Then in the 1990’s there was a resurgence of interest in hardwood flooring. Thirty-two percent of homes built from 1991-2010 have hardwoods. From 2011- 2019 it dropped back down to 24%. Here’s the interesting part, during that same time-frame interest in manufactured wood flooring (laminate) soared. Combining the original hardwood flooring and laminate style flooring a total of 73% of homes build from 2011-2019 have those flooring options installed.

I bet you never knew you wanted to know this much about hardwood flooring! Stay tuned for our next adventure in Utah housing trends and history!