Wood Flooring in Firth, Idaho

Firth grew up as a Swedish farm settlement in the 1880s, strung along the east bank of the Snake River facing the Blackfoot Mountains. The town itself formed around 1903, when the Oregon Short Line shifted its water tank a mile south from Basalt and houses followed the depot. What that history leaves us is a stock of modest farmhouses and bungalows, many remodeled a half-dozen times. Peel back a kitchen or hallway in one and you often find sheet linoleum, then a plywood underlayment, then narrow fir laid decades ago. That fir is usually worth saving. It sanded thin in spots and shows cut nails, but a careful screen and refinish brings back a floor no big-box product matches. The catch in older Firth homes is what sits under the vinyl. Sheet goods and black cutback mastic installed before the early 1980s can contain asbestos, and sanding or ripping them blind is the wrong move. We plan removal around that: test first through a lab when age is uncertain, and never grind unknown mastic. River-bottom lots here also run damp crawlspaces during irrigation season, so we read moisture under the house before we commit to solid wood. Where the subfloor has swelled or a leak rotted the decking, we replace the bad sections, flatten the field, and only then lay finish. It is slower, but it is how a Firth floor lasts.