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We started this job on Wednesday and we finished it on Thursday.  This house was in South Minneapolis off of Nicollet Ave S.  It had 1.5 inch maple hardwood floors.  They had a really old varnish on the floor, that was on top of an oil based polyurethane. [click to continue...]

This is a job we finished today in Brooklyn Park.  This floor is inch and a half wide red oak hardwood.  As you can see from the first picture the floors were not in good shape.  My client wanted to save some money, clean up the floors and protect them.  It was for a rental property so we didn’t want to spend too much money, but wanted to make them look nice.

In this situation I would usually to a complete refinish, but if money is an issue, I would then recommend a buff and re coat.  The difference is a refinish will completely sand the floor and remove the finish from the hardwood, but a buff and coat will only lightly sand the finish coat.  After we buff or sand, we then apply the finish.  In this case it was an oil based semi-gloss finish.

As you can see from the third picture the floors look a lot better.  They are not in perfect shape and would be a lot cleaner with a complete refinish, but sometimes people are just going for this look, they want to save money and it only takes a day to complete vs two or three for a total refinish.  A lot of homes could be buff and recoat on oak hardwood floors in Brooklyn Park MN, it just depends on what your going for.

Personally I like the refinish look a lot more because I know how much it can clean the floor.  However, I do own rental properties and I know that tenets can be very hard on the floors.  I buff and coated one of my own rentals last year and it looks a lot better.  I did refinish it completely the year before so it was already in good shape.

We don’t know what is going to happen. This is risk. The uncertain future, the more uncertain, the more risk. Investors, families, businessman are always calculating risk. We are trying to find the odds, figure them out, and make decisions that put the odds in our favor. One way to decrease risk is to have logical laws. [click to continue...]

I try to stay apolitical. Most the time I want to find the best solution to a problem. I don’t care if you’re liberal or conservative; I just want to get the job done right. But, right now, with all this bailout talk about stimulating the economy, it seems to me that President Obama, or Congress messed up the stimulus bill. The one thing in the bill that would no doubt stimulate the economy was the $15,000 tax credit for people who purchased a home this year. This is just common sense. Imagine that you owe $3,000 in taxes at the end of the year, but if you purchase a house you get back $12,000 in cash instead. Most likely if you bought a house it would need work. You would probably spend $4,000-6,000 fixing the plumbing, hardwood floors, electrical and painting. You might even get to update the bathroom. That money from taxes would pay the plumber, electrician, floor guy and bathroom guy. In addition, because you bought a foreclosed home that was vacant, now you’re paying the property taxes that the government wasn’t getting before. Do you see what I am getting at? Instead, the money in the bill is going for unemployment payments and food stamps. How are food stamps going to create jobs? It doesn’t make sense to me, but it seems that we are heading done a path that does not encourage investment in business and assets that create wealth and jobs. If you’re looking for a hardwood floor refinishing estimate give me a call, I won’t get political, I promise.

Please, please pass this bill. The United States Senate just approved a bill that would give home buyers a tax credit of 10% of the value of a purchased home. So if you bought a $150,000 home, then you would get a $15,000 tax credit. [click to continue...]

Government is getting bigger. According to Investor’s Business Daily the federal government has added 17 million new jobs since 1947. Right now there are 22.5 million people now getting paid by your tax dollars. Today there are 13.5 Americans per government worker, but in 1947 there was 26 Americans per government worker. The question is what is the value of the output that each government employee is producing? We have a trillion dollar budget deficit and our economy is very weak. Congress is ready to spend another $826 billion in more government jobs that seem to not be very productive. I think what we need to do is fire some of those people and take the money that is being spent on these unproductive bureaucrats and give it to hardworking Americans that know how to produce something of value. If you are thinking about getting your hardwood floors refinished in St Paul, give me a call. I promise I will be productive.

Here is a great deal. You can purchase a house by July 1^st 2009 and if you’re a first time home buyer you get a $7500 tax credit on your 2008 taxes or your 2009 taxes. That is great. So a purchase you make today will help offset your tax liability from last year. Say you owe $4000 in taxes for 2008. [click to continue...]

Right now people are scared.  What is going to happen in the future?  It is hard to say, but I know things will be ok in the long run.  People will still need food, clothes, houses, chemicals, building materials, health care, sugar, corn, and oil.  We will still need accountants to do our bookkeeping, engineers to design buildings and cars.  Right now I feel there is just more supply for most products then there is demand and this is the problem.  Things got out of whack because there was too much cheap money being used by banks and consumers.  Things are different now.  Only the people with very good credit will get approved, only very strong companies will be able to survive.  The people who do not have really good credit or bad business will probably fail if they don’t work hard, very hard to overcome this adversity.  In the long run it will force those that are relatively weaker to change their behavior, try harder, gain new skills that are in more demand.  The stronger businesses that are more fundamentally sound will profit from this downturn by getting customers and clients from the weaker ones that fail.  They will expand their businesses, acquire more capital, and invest it in workers and productivity. This change will then lead do an expansion and growth. We got ourselves into this mess. What can you expect when for years people were buying two, three, four houses with no money down, no income or job? There are going to be problems. If you need your Minneapolis hardwood floors refinished give me a call. I promise I won’t scare you.

You’re fired! More people in the United States loss their jobs than any other month since December 1974. Also 600,000 people lost their jobs in November. More cuts are to be expected over the next year. What can you do about this? It is tough, but we just need to work harder. [click to continue...]