About VGJ Floors Covering

We are not a flooring retailer, not a dealer for any finish brand, and not a franchise: the person who quotes your floor is on the crew that sands it.

The business, in facts

What we actually do

Six categories of work on wood floors: refinishing and sanding, new installation, repair and restoration, staining and colour matching, stairs, and commercial floors.

Most of what comes through the door is refinishing — bringing back a floor that is already there rather than replacing it. New Jersey has some of the oldest housing stock in the country, and a great deal of it has wood underneath that is worth saving.

We also install new floors, replace damaged boards, and handle the work most crews would rather not quote: stairs, parquet, pet damage, water events.

All 15 services →

What we are, and what we are not

We are a site-finishing contractor: the floor is sanded and finished in your house, by the crew that quoted it. We do not sell flooring, we do not subcontract the sanding, and we are not affiliated with any finish manufacturer.

This distinction decides more than it sounds like it does. A retailer sells you material and arranges an installer; a franchise sends whichever crew is free that week; a dealer recommends the finish it is contracted to move. In each of those the person who priced the job and the person who does it are different people, and the judgement made at the quote does not survive to the jobsite.

Site-finished means the boards are sanded flat as one surface after they are down, and the finish flows across the seams. Prefinished flooring arrives coated with micro-bevels between the boards. Both are legitimate; they are not the same product, and only one of them can be colour-matched to a floor you already own.

We name finish products by manufacturer and cite the published data sheet, for the same reason: a brand we are not paid to recommend is a brand you can check on us.

How we quote

We measure moisture and check what is left of the wear layer before putting a number on the job.

A floor is not a square-footage problem. Two rooms of identical size can be different jobs depending on how much wood remains above the tongue, what the subfloor is doing, whether the boards are cupped, and how much of the perimeter is trim and closet.

Quoting without measuring means quoting an assumption. When the assumption is wrong, someone pays for it — usually the homeowner, in a second visit.

When we say no

If there is no wear layer left, if a floor needs to dry before it can be sanded, or if the honest answer is replacement rather than refinishing, we say so.

The most expensive mistake in this trade is sanding a cupped floor flat before the moisture has equalised. It looks fixed for a few weeks, then the boards flatten and the middle stands proud — a worse problem, created by the repair.

Waiting is sometimes the work. It is also the hardest thing to tell someone who wants their house back.

Where we work

185 municipalities across 9 New Jersey counties: Monmouth, Ocean, Middlesex, Union, Essex, Hudson, Somerset, Mercer and Burlington.

The service area is a real boundary, not a marketing radius. Every town on the list has a page with its own housing figures, and a town that is not on the list is a town we would be guessing about.

Monmouth and Ocean are where most of the work is. Essex and Union bring the oldest housing — and with it the pre-1978 lead-safe question on most jobs rather than a few.

Every town we serve, with its housing data →

What we are registered as

New Jersey does not license flooring as a trade. What it requires is registration as a home improvement contractor business, which produces a number beginning with the prefix 13VH, renewed every year by 31 March.

Ask us for the number and check it yourself on the state's public lookup. It is free, it takes a minute, and the status has to read Active — a number that was valid when a neighbour used a contractor may have lapsed since.

Registration is the first filter, not the decision. There is no state exam behind it. What it proves is that a business filed and insured; what it does not prove is that anyone there can sand a floor.

What the 13VH registration actually means →

The standards we work to

Moisture tolerances follow NWFA installation guidelines, slab and subfloor testing follows the ASTM methods those guidelines reference, and work in pre-1978 housing follows the EPA lead-safe rule.

Only the last of the three carries the force of law. The other two decide your material warranty, which is where the consequence actually lands: a manufacturer conditions its warranty on installation to industry standards, and a floor installed without documented readings leaves the homeowner arguing about conditions nobody recorded.

That is why readings go in writing. It costs nothing when the work was done properly, and it is the only evidence that exists later.

The standards, and how each one applies here →

Why we publish data

Because the age of a house predicts more about its floor than anything visible from the doorway, and that information was not available anywhere a homeowner could use it.

We reshaped the US Census housing figures to the municipality level for every town we serve, documented the approximations, and published it openly under CC BY 4.0. You can look up your own town rather than take our word for it.

Across the towns we serve the median home was built in 1964, and 107 of 185 have more than 60% of their housing built before 1978. Those two numbers are why the lead-safe question and the wear-layer question come up here more than they do elsewhere.

See the housing data for your town →

Who writes what you read here

Everything on this site is written from work done in New Jersey houses, with every figure traced to a published standard, a manufacturer data sheet or the US Census.

Where we have not done something, we do not write about it as though we had. Where a figure has no source, it does not go in. Several articles here end with the conclusion that the reader should not buy the service — that is the point.

When a standard is revised or a figure changes, we update the article and say so, rather than republishing the same content under a new headline.

How we write, in full →

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Frequently asked questions