Wood Flooring in Westchester and Riviera, Bakersfield
Bakersfield Premium Wood Flooring provides professional wood flooring in Westchester and Riviera, Bakersfield, CA — hardwood installation, floor refinishing, historic restoration, board patching, and subfloor repair. These are the tree-lined streets west of downtown along the Kern River, and the housing stock here is the most architecturally mixed in the city.
Westchester and Riviera turn up alongside Downtown and Oleander-Sunset in the City of Bakersfield's cultural resource survey of the city's historic neighborhoods, which tells you something about the age and quality of what is here. It also tells you the floors are worth looking at before anyone talks about replacing them.
Three Eras of Floor in One Neighborhood
The architecture here runs from early twentieth century Craftsman through Spanish Colonial Revival to mid-century ranch, sometimes on the same block. That variety is the neighborhood's charm and it is also why one flooring answer does not cover it.
The Craftsman houses have vertical-grain Douglas fir, often with a darker border inlay around the perimeter of the living and dining rooms, and built-in bookcases that the floor runs up against rather than under. Those borders are worth preserving and they complicate sanding, because you cannot run a machine across the grain change without leaving marks.
The Spanish Colonial Revival homes are more likely to have red oak, sometimes quartersawn, under arched doorways and against textured plaster walls. Red oak here has usually been stained mid-brown at some point, and stripping that back to something lighter is one of the more common requests we get in this neighborhood.
Then the mid-century ranches, which are the ones most likely to have oak strip flooring hiding under wall-to-wall carpet installed in the 1970s and never removed. Pull a corner in a bedroom closet and you will know inside of five minutes whether you have a floor or a subfloor.
Additions, Level Changes and Mismatched Fields
Because these houses are old and the lots are generous, a large share of them have been added onto — a family room off the back, a converted porch, a garage turned into a bedroom. Each of those additions brought its own subfloor and its own flooring, and they rarely line up with the original.
That produces the two problems we deal with most here. First, a height difference at the doorway between old and new, sometimes a quarter inch or more, which has to be shimmed or planed before any continuous floor goes across it. Second, two fields of flooring running in different directions with no graceful way to meet.
Sometimes the honest fix is a threshold or a feature strip rather than pretending a lace will look invisible. We will show you both options and tell you which one we would do in our own house. A lace across a perpendicular field always shows eventually, usually in the first low winter sun.
Under it all, most of these homes sit on a raised foundation over a crawl space, which means real subfloor work is possible without tearing up the finished floor. Sagged joists get sistered from below, squeaks get shimmed from below, and the floor above never comes up.
Kern River Proximity and What It Means Underneath
The neighborhood borders the Kern River, and the houses closest to it sit on ground that behaves differently from the rest of the city. Crawl spaces run damper, which is generally not a problem until a vapor barrier is missing or torn, at which point the underside of the subfloor stays wetter than the top and boards start to cup.
So on any job in this part of town we get into the crawl space with a meter before quoting a new floor. A ground cover and adequate venting are cheap. A cupped hardwood floor eighteen months after installation is not, and the manufacturer will not cover it.
East of here the character changes quickly once you cross into the commercial blocks of downtown Bakersfield , where the building stock skews to post-1952 construction and most of our work is commercial rather than residential.
The mature street trees the neighborhood is known for matter too, in a small way. Heavy shade keeps interior light lower and cooler year-round, which is one reason mid-brown and darker floors read better here than they do in the sun-blasted newer subdivisions on the west side.
What We Charge and How We Schedule Here
Refinishing runs $3.25 to $5.50 per square foot. New solid hardwood is $9 to $16 installed, engineered $7 to $13. Subfloor and crawl space work is quoted separately by the job, because a sound 1948 floor system and a sagging one are entirely different scopes.
These houses are usually occupied while we work, so containment matters. Zippered plastic across doorways, return air vents taped, HEPA collection outside. We work room by room where the layout allows it, so a family is never locked out of the whole house at once.
One more thing worth planning around: many of these homes have original wide baseboards with a separate shoe molding. We can usually pull and reinstall the shoe without damaging the baseboard, which saves repainting the whole room. Tell us at the estimate if the trim is original and we will handle it accordingly.
Westchester and Riviera Wood Flooring Questions
What kind of wood floors are in Westchester homes?
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Can you match the floor in my addition to the original house?
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My floors are cupping near the river side of the house. Why?
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Do I have to remove my original baseboards?
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Can you fix squeaks without pulling up the floor?
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Free Estimates in Westchester and Riviera
We will look at the floor, get into the crawl space, and give you an itemized number with prep, repair, and finish on separate lines. Mon-Fri 7am-5pm, Sat 8am-2pm.