If you decide to put maple floors in your house, you'll have to come up with some cash. The type of flooring you use and your location will help determine the final price. Installation costs vary, from a low of about $3 a square foot to $14 or more. There may be extra charges, too, to prepare the floor. The kind of flooring you buy will vary, too.
Pick a Kind of Flooring
You can buy solid maple flooring, either unfinished or prefinished, engineered flooring, which is a maple veneer on a cheaper lumber base, or laminate, which is basically fake maple imprinted on tough plastic. Expect to pay from between $4 to $9 a square foot for your material. Measure your room and multiply the length times the width to get the square footage you'll need and the cost.
Installation Costs Vary with Material
Installation costs will vary with the type of flooring. Unfinished maple is the cheapest, usually from $6 to $8 a square foot, but you'll have to pay extra to have it finished with a polyurethane or varnish. Prefinished installation will run from about $7 or $8 a square foot up to $12 or $14, laminate is about the same. Prefinished is higher because it requires more care in installation.
Ask What Installation Covers
You'll need to ask what installation fees actually cover. Some include basic preparation and removal of trash after the job is finished. If preparation is extra, you can pay up to $60 an hour or so for removal of baseboards and old flooring and installation of plywood subfloor. Plywood can cost $20 or more a sheet.
Nailing Is Cheapest
It's cheapest to have basic solid maple flooring strips installed with nails. They typically have tongue and groove connections like other hardwood flooring and strips are nailed through the tongues into the wood subfloor. If you have a concrete slab floor, you can have maple flooring glued on but it will be more expensive.
Get Estimates
Once you know how much flooring you need, it's best to get several estimates. Compare prices from suppliers that install the flooring with costs of buying the material yourself and hiring a flooring contractor or carpenter to install it. You can do it yourself, too, if you're handy, for a cost usually of about $4 to $6 a square foot.
References
Writer Bio
Bob Haring has been a news writer and editor for more than 50 years, mostly with the Associated Press and then as executive editor of the Tulsa, Okla. "World." Since retiring he has written freelance stories and a weekly computer security column. Haring holds a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri.