On a wet floor in Georgetown, what is down matters more than how much water there was. The newer stock leans heavily on engineered plank and laminate through the main living space, and the two behave nothing alike once they are wet: engineered can sometimes be dried where the veneer has not lifted, while a laminate core that has swollen is a replacement and no amount of equipment changes that. The older houses off the Square are where solid wood turns up, and a solid hardwood floor is usually the one worth a slow, careful schedule.
Telling them apart takes a few seconds at a vent cutout or the end of a run, and it is worth doing before anyone prices anything. After that, the tells are all about dwell time: click joints swollen so they no longer meet flush, veneer lifting at a board edge, planks that rock underfoot, and dark shadows where an area rug or a piece of furniture sat and held moisture against the finish. On a slab there is no subfloor to save, which changes the last question, because the concrete itself holds water and new flooring glued over a slab that still reads high will fail on its own inside a year.
Reading the wood before anyone commits
Every drying plan here starts with two numbers: what the boards read at the wet edge, and what the same floor reads in a room the leak never touched. The second one is the target. Where drying is realistic, mats seal to the surface and a vacuum draws moisture up through the boards while a dehumidifier keeps the room able to take it, and the pace stays slow on purpose, because a floor brought back too fast crowns instead of flattening. Where it is not realistic, we say so on the first visit and put the money toward removal and drying the slab properly instead of a week of equipment on a floor that was never coming back.
- The floor identified as solid, engineered, or laminate before anything is quoted
- Pin readings on the boards and a reference from an untouched room
- Vacuum mats and a slow schedule wherever drying is realistic
- The slab itself dried and read before any new flooring goes down

Hardwood floor water damage rewards an early decision and punishes a hopeful one. Call (512) 271-5099 and we will put pins in the boards and the slab and give you the unvarnished version.










