Stairs & trim in Longview, WA

Few towns in the Northwest can tell you exactly why every street is where it is. Longview can. It was financed by Robert Alexander Long of the Long-Bell Lumber Company and described as the largest planned city ever built entirely with private funds. The St. Louis planner George B. Kessler was contracted to complete the plans, drawing on the City Beautiful movement, and the city was incorporated on 14 February 1924. The 2020 census counted 37,818 residents, the most in Cowlitz County.

Two pieces of that history matter when you are choosing a floor.

The first is the ground. The flat land Long-Bell bought across the Cowlitz River had a high water table, and it took a dike 15 miles long and drainage canals before the delta was fit to build on. Lake Sacajawea, now a 60-acre park, began as a slough. None of that is a reason to avoid any particular floor, but it is a good reason to take moisture seriously. Before we recommend hardwood or anything glued down, we want to know what is under the house, how the crawlspace or slab behaves through a wet winter, and whether the vapour barrier is doing its job. A little testing at the start costs far less than a cupped floor later.

The second is the housing. The first permanent homes Long-Bell built were 250 small cottages for mill workers in the Highlands and St. Helens additions, and the city grew outward from the Civic Center from there. Smaller, older rooms reward a different approach than a modern open plan. Continuity helps: one floor carried through connected rooms makes a modest footprint feel larger, and carefully handled thresholds matter more when doorways are original. If there is wood under the carpet, we will tell you honestly whether refinishing it is the better project before we talk about replacing it.

The climate is a little different from Vancouver's, too. Longview sits in a small gorge and typically runs about 7 °F cooler than Portland, with summer-evening gusts of 30 to 40 mph funnelled along the Columbia. Cooler, damper air is one more reason to let hardwood acclimate in the house it is going into rather than installing it straight off a truck.

Longview is in Cowlitz County, a drive up I-5 from our Vancouver showroom, so we plan Longview projects around a consultation by appointment and a clear schedule from removal through to the final trim.