Beautiful Wood Floors

08/04/2026

Sixty thousand of our neighbors were told to leave their homes on Saturday.

Not eventually. Not if things get worse. Grab the kids, grab the dog, go now.

It started just after noon. By that night the Old Trails Fire had crossed the river and walked into north Spokane. A woman standing out there watching it said something on the news that I have not been able to shake. "When the sun rises, we are going to be in shock."

The sun came up Sunday and she was right.

More than 700 structures are gone. Around 640 of those were lost in the Old Trails Fire alone, most of them homes in Indian Trail and Five Mile Prairie. Three fires burning across more than 8,000 acres. As of this afternoon, zero percent contained.

Old Trails at 3,619 acres north of Airway Heights. Autumn Lane at 3,351 out toward Nine Mile Falls. Fairview at 1,056 near Mead. Another one still going near Medical Lake.

They evacuated patients out of the VA hospital Saturday night. Sit with what that takes.

Six hundred and forty families. Every single one of those is somebody's entire life. The pencil marks on the door frame where you measured your kids. A wedding dress in a closet. The photo albums nobody ever got around to scanning. The last thing your mother gave you before she died. There is no insurance line item for any of it and you do not get it back.

If that is you right now, or your kid, or your parents, or your best friend from high school, we are so deeply sorry. Nothing anybody types on Facebook helps you today and we know that.

Now let me talk about the people who ran at it.

Crews have been on those lines since Saturday afternoon on almost no sleep. Doing structure protection in neighborhoods where the fire was already in the trees over their heads. Strike teams drove in from all over Washington. Kent, Bothell, Gig Harbor, Bainbridge, Bremerton, Kitsap. A California incident management team took over command on Sunday.

And crews from right here in Idaho went over there too.

That is the part I want people in Kootenai County to hold onto. Our firefighters got in the trucks and crossed the state line to stand between somebody else's family and a wall of fire. Nobody asked whose county it was. Nobody asked what the address said. There were people in trouble twenty minutes up the road and that was the whole conversation.

That is what these people are. That is what they have always been. And most of the year nobody thinks about them at all until the sky turns orange.

To every firefighter still out there. Every medic. Every dispatcher who held it together while the calls stacked up faster than anybody could answer them. Every deputy and every officer who knocked on doors at midnight and told families they had minutes. Every Red Cross volunteer setting up cots. Every person who showed up with water and dog food and a pickup and just asked where to put it.

Thank you. We mean that with everything we have got.

On the cause. The Spokane County Sheriff's Office has arrested a 37 year old man on suspicion of first degree arson in the Old Trails Fire. He is being held on a million dollars bail. He is charged and not convicted, and he gets his day in court the same as anyone, so we will leave it there. But if it turns out that 640 families lost everything because somebody knelt down in dry grass with a lighter, that is going to sit in this region for a very long time.

Now here is why this is not just a Spokane story.

The same wind event hit us on Saturday. Red Flag Warning, gusts around 50 miles an hour, grass like paper. Avista shut off power on purpose that afternoon across roughly twenty areas between Grangeville and Rathdrum, and more than 67,000 customers went dark.

If your lights went out Saturday, that was not a malfunction. They pulled the plug deliberately so a downed line would not do here what happened over there.

That is how thin the margin was. Our neighbors twenty minutes west lost 640 homes. We lost the refrigerator for a night.

So go do one small thing tonight. Get the pine needles off your roof and out of your gutters. Move the woodpile away from the side of the house. Cut the dry grass back thirty feet if you have got it in you. Put a bag by the door with medications, documents, chargers, and something for the animals. Talk to your family about where you would meet if the phones went down.

And if you have got a spare room, a garage, a couch, a pasture for somebody's horses, say so in the comments. Somebody reading this tonight needs exactly that.

Check on the older folks on your street. A lot of them will not call anybody.

We spend most of our time on this page holding public officials to account and we are going to keep doing that. But not today. Today the people in uniform are the ones running into it, and our neighbors are standing in parking lots looking at the place where their house used to be.

Hug somebody tonight.

07/11/2026

Engineered Flooring Is a Product. Solid Hardwood Is a Building Material.

There are well-made engineered hardwood floors. Some are manufactured with exceptional care, use substantial wear layers, and perform appropriately in applications where solid wood may not be the preferred choice.

But those products should not distract us from the larger truth:

Most engineered hardwood flooring is inherently inferior to properly selected, properly installed, and properly maintained solid hardwood flooring when measured by longevity, repairability, reproducibility, and generational value.

That is not marketing language. It is the physical reality of the materials.

Engineered flooring is often promoted as being more stable than solid wood. Under carefully controlled interior conditions, it frequently is. Modern homes regulate temperature and humidity better than homes did generations ago, and engineered flooring benefits greatly from those controlled environments.

But real homes do not remain perfect forever.

Roofs fail. Plumbing leaks. Appliances malfunction. Windows are left open. Vacation homes sit unattended. Humidity systems stop operating. Storms introduce water into buildings. Heating systems fail during winter. Life happens.

When substantial moisture reaches an engineered floor, the very construction promoted as its advantage can become its weakness. Multiple layers, adhesives, thin wear surfaces, and opposing wood species may swell, distort, separate, or delaminate. Once the internal construction is compromised, the floor may no longer be practically repairable.

It is often removed and discarded.

Then another problem appears: the flooring installed ten or fifteen years earlier may no longer be manufactured. The collection may have been discontinued. The color may have changed. The texture, bevel, plank dimensions, finish, core construction, or locking system may no longer exist. Even when the manufacturer survives, the original product may not.

A homeowner may need only twenty replacement boards, yet find that no genuine replacement material is available.

Solid hardwood operates differently.

A traditional solid wood floor does not depend upon a proprietary product line remaining in production. Its species, thickness, width, grade, profile, and milling can be identified and reproduced. Standard dimensions have been milled by countless manufacturers for generations. A competent mill or craftsman can create replacement material without needing permission, inventory, or continued support from the company that produced the original floor.

That is genuine future serviceability.

Solid hardwood can absorb moisture, release moisture, move, cup, crown, stain, and suffer damage. It is not invulnerable. But because it is solid lumber throughout its thickness, it possesses something most engineered floors do not:

A meaningful capacity to recover.

It can often be dried.

It can be flattened.

It can be repaired board by board.

It can be resanded.

It can be refinished.

It can be recolored.

It can be restored after decades of wear and returned to service rather than removed from the home.

Hardwood flooring craftsmen regularly preserve floors that are older than many of today’s manufacturers. Some of the floors still serving homes today were installed before modern flooring brands, modern adhesives, factory finishing systems, and engineered flooring construction even existed.

Those floors have survived because their value was never dependent upon a warranty department.

They survived because they were made from authentic material, installed by knowledgeable people, and capable of being repaired by the generations that followed.

Consider what the modern engineered-floor warranty actually promises. The headline may advertise twenty-five years, thirty-five years, or even a lifetime. The exclusions and conditions may require tightly controlled humidity, stable temperature, approved subfloors, approved adhesives, documented moisture testing, specific maintenance products, and precise installation procedures.

Those conditions may be technically reasonable. But they also reveal an uncomfortable truth:

The warranty often protects the manufacturer more effectively than it protects the homeowner.

A long warranty is not the same thing as a long-lived floor.

A floor does not become generational because a brochure says “lifetime.” It becomes generational because it can survive damage, accept repair, accommodate change, and remain serviceable after the original seller and manufacturer are gone.

This is also where the sustainability argument becomes unavoidable.

Engineered flooring is often promoted as environmentally responsible because it uses a thinner layer of desirable hardwood. That may reduce the amount of premium lumber used during initial production. But sustainability cannot be measured only on the day a product leaves the factory.

It must also be measured when the floor is damaged.

Can it be repaired, or must it be replaced?

Can one section be restored, or must an entire continuous floor be removed?

Can replacement boards be reproduced locally, or must a discontinued factory product be located?

Can the floor accept another century of service, or is it destined for demolition once its limited wear surface or layered core is compromised?

A material that uses fewer resources initially but must later be torn out and discarded is not automatically more sustainable than a solid material that can be repaired and renewed repeatedly.

Solid hardwood is not merely recyclable.

It is maintainable.

It is repairable.

It is reproducible.

It is renewable.

And when properly installed and responsibly stewarded, it can remain in service long enough to outlive the people, companies, trends, and warranties surrounding its original purchase.

The reason engineered flooring dominates much of the current marketplace is not that it has proven itself superior across centuries.

It is easier to package.

Easier to distribute.

Easier to standardize.

Easier to install quickly.

Easier to sell through volume-driven retail systems.

And easier to replace when the next product cycle arrives.

Solid hardwood asks more of everyone involved. It requires greater judgment, greater preparation, greater knowledge of moisture and structure, and greater skill from the craftsperson installing and finishing it.

That does not make solid hardwood obsolete.

It makes the craftsmanship surrounding it more valuable.

The flooring industry has not moved entirely toward engineered products because solid hardwood stopped performing. It has moved in that direction partly because the marketplace became increasingly optimized for speed, volume, simplified labor, proprietary products, and repeat consumption.

That may be good for manufacturing.

It is not necessarily good for the homeowner.

Before choosing a floor, ask a more serious question than which product carries the longest warranty:

What will happen when this floor is damaged twenty years from now?

Can it be repaired?

Can matching material be made?

Can it be refinished?

Can it remain with the home?

Or will it become another discontinued product that must be torn out and purchased again?

A floor can be a temporary surface placed over a building.

Or it can become part of the building itself.

One is a product.

The other is an inheritance.

In a world growing increasingly artificial and increasingly disposable, choose something real.

Beautiful Wood Floors serves homeowners in Coeur d’Alene and the surrounding region who are seeking authentic solid hardwood flooring, natural finishes, responsible material choices, and the craftsmanship required to create floors worthy of generations.

06/16/2026

The Keeper of the Story

The first thing I noticed was the smell.

Dust, old wood, and the faint scent of time trapped beneath floorboards that had not seen daylight in decades.

As I knelt there, running my hand across the worn surface, I could feel the marks left behind by people I would never meet. Tiny scratches. Dents from furniture long since discarded. The subtle wear of countless footsteps passing through the same room, year after year.

Most people experience a floor from above. I have spent much of my life seeing it from only a few inches away—close enough to notice what time leaves behind.

Over the years, that perspective has taken me into remarkable places. Historic homes overlooking the Potomac River. Quiet residences tucked into the neighborhoods of Georgetown. Rooms where generations of families lived ordinary lives while history unfolded beyond their windows.

In one home, workers carefully unfolded newspapers hidden inside a wall for more than a century. Among the pages was an obituary announcing the death of Leo Tolstoy. In another, we discovered old coins beneath floorboards, forgotten stamps beneath moulding, and boxes of love letters hidden behind the bricks of a fireplace.

The objects were fascinating.

But they were not the thing that stayed with me.

The floor stayed with me.

The same oak. The same pine. The same boards that quietly remained while the world transformed around them.

Before men walked on the moon, they were there. They were there when families gathered around radios to hear voices from distant places. They were there when the first notes of new music drifted through living room speakers, when children raced down hallways, when families celebrated milestones, welcomed new generations, and said goodbye to loved ones.

The people changed. The furniture changed. The world changed.

The floor remained.

There is an old saying among woodworkers that wood remembers. Whether literally true or not, there is something about the idea that feels right.

Wood records sunlight. It records droughts, winters, storms, and seasons. Every growth ring marks another year of life. Long before it became a floor, the tree itself was already keeping a story.

Perhaps that is what makes wood different.

Gold can exist without life. Stone can exist without life. Steel can exist without life.

But wood begins as a living thing.

A tree stands for decades—sometimes generations—gathering sunlight from a star ninety-three million miles away and transforming it into something tangible. It grows quietly, patiently, ring by ring. Then one day, through the hands of foresters, millworkers, craftsmen, and builders, that tree becomes part of a home.

And a new story begins.

The tree’s story becomes our story.

The floor that once recorded seasons now records lives. It feels the footsteps of children on Christmas morning. It carries families gathering around holiday tables. It witnesses conversations, celebrations, disappointments, laughter, and ordinary moments that eventually become cherished memories.

That may be why so many people are drawn to genuine hardwood floors, even when they struggle to explain exactly why.

It is rarely about the wood alone.

It is about what the wood represents.

Something real.

Something that grows more beautiful with age rather than less.

Something that can be repaired rather than discarded.

Something that accumulates meaning.

In an age increasingly filled with products designed to be replaced, there remains something deeply satisfying about choosing materials intended to endure. Not because permanence is practical, but because permanence is human.

A home is one of the few places where our values become visible. The architecture says something. The artwork says something. The furnishings say something. Every choice becomes part of a larger expression of who we are and how we wish to live.

Yet few choices remain long enough to witness the full story.

A hardwood floor can.

The homes being built today throughout the Inland Northwest will one day become the homes future generations remember. Children not yet born will celebrate milestones upon those floors. Families will gather, grow, and change around them. Decades from now, someone may kneel where a craftsman once knelt and wonder about the people who came before.

Perhaps they will discover a coin.

Or a letter.

Or some forgotten artifact tucked away in a hidden corner.

And perhaps they will pause for a moment and realize that they, too, have become part of a much longer story.

At Beautiful Wood Floors, we believe the floor is the keeper of the story. Not because it simply survives the passage of time, but because it participates in it.

In a world growing increasingly artificial and increasingly disposable, choose something real.

Choose something worthy of being remembered.

06/03/2026

Another solo and magnificent effort by my son, Nicholas Burnam.

This project required a bit more than just hard work—it demanded thoughtful problem-solving, patience, and a delicate touch.

Australian Cypress can be a challenging species for even experienced refinishing craftsmen. Unlike traditional hardwoods such as oak or maple, Cypress contains very soft grain interspersed with extremely hard knots. During sanding, the softer grain cuts away much more quickly than the knots, creating a challenge we call “dish-out.” If not handled properly, the result can be a floor that appears rippled, with the knots standing proud above the surrounding surface rather than maintaining a smooth, flat plane. You’ve probably seen floors with that effect before without knowing what caused it.

Nick relied on his training, stayed disciplined in his sanding procedures, and paid close attention to the many details—including several tricky transitions and mixed-material areas. The result is exactly what every craftsman hopes for: an old, tired diamond in the rough restored to beautiful new life.

Maybe I’m a little biased, but I have to say it anyway:

Nick, outstanding work, sir.

Thank you for carrying the Burnam name with such professionalism and pride.

05/30/2026

05/29/2026

I am a proud father. This is my son’s, Nicholas Burnam, work.
From start to finish. He has “the gift”.
I can’t express how it feels to look at this and see what he has done and how it feels like a dream come true.

60+ year old red oak, finished with Odie’s Super Duper DARK oil.

IYKYK

05/28/2026

So the client wanted us to turn his black walnut floors into something that would resemble all of his natural looking quartersawn white oak doors, cabinets and trim (door case in these pics for reference)
How’d we do?

In a world becoming increasingly artificial, choose something real.
- Beautiful Wood Floors

05/01/2026

Not every floor gets the chance to reach its 100th birthday — and fewer still are trusted to craftsmen who understand what that milestone means.

This floor was installed in 1926, when this home became the first house built on Fernan Hill Road overlooking Coeur d’Alene.

A century later, the original white oak floor is still here, carrying the quiet history of the home in every board.

But time eventually catches up with every floor. The nails are beginning to show, which means the wood has reached the end of its sanding life. This refinish would likely be the last full sanding this floor will ever see.

We were honored to be the craftsmen trusted to do it.

After sanding, the client chose Odie’s Oil to protect the floor moving forward. It’s a system we’ve come to trust and specialize in, and at the moment it’s still relatively uncommon in the Coeur d’Alene area.

One thing the homeowner was especially excited about was finally saying goodbye to the old orange urethane look that many floors from past decades developed over time.

With the help of Odie’s Creative Colours, a little Titanium White, All the Greige, and a touch of Burnt Ochre, we softened and cooled the tone, creating a natural linen color while still allowing the warm patina that antique white oak develops over a century to remain.

One of the things we love about working with Odie’s is that every floor becomes a little bit one of a kind, shaped by the wood itself and the choices made during the finishing process.

Unlike older urethane finishes that amber heavily with age, Odie’s keeps the tone much more stable.

And when the floor eventually needs attention again, it won’t require sanding. A simple cleaning and a fresh application of Universal Oil will bring it back to life — good for another decade or more.

If a different color is ever desired down the road, Odie’s also offers ways to adjust the tone without another sanding, preserving the remaining life of the floor.

The result keeps the soul of the original floor intact while preparing it for the years ahead.

One hundred years old… and ready for the next century.

04/20/2026

Hardwood Flooring Craftsmen Wanted – Coeur d’Alene / Spokane Region

Beautiful Wood Floors is a small but highly specialized hardwood flooring company focused on true craftsmanship rather than production work. Our projects often involve detailed restoration, custom finishing, and working inside clients’ homes where professionalism matters. We are building a team of people who take pride in doing things the right way, not just the fast way.

Our work is based in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and the Spokane, Washington region, serving homeowners throughout North Idaho and Eastern Washington.

Positions Available

We are currently looking for:

• Experienced hardwood flooring craftsmen
• Apprentices / trainees who want to learn the trade

Ideal Experience

Preferred candidates will have 2–3 years experience in one or more of the following:

• Hardwood floor sanding and refinishing
• Floor installation
• Finish application (oil or waterborne systems)
• Jobsite setup and dust containment
• Equipment operation and maintenance

If you have no experience but a strong work ethic, we may consider training the right person — especially someone who enjoys working with their hands, takes pride in doing things the right way, and doesn’t mind being given direction and coaching while learning the trade.

Compensation

Pay depends on experience and skill level:

• Trainee / Apprentice: starting around $18/hour
• Experienced Craftsman: $25–$35/hour

Performance bonuses may also be available.

Must Have

• Reliable transportation to and from job sites
• Ability to work in private homes with professionalism and respect
• Clean criminal background (required by our insurance since we work in clients’ residences)

Work Environment

• Primarily residential projects, often high-end homes
• Professional equipment and dust containment systems
• Weekends off in most cases
• Opportunity to grow in skill and responsibility

NWFA training and professional development are expected as part of mastering the trade.

Military veterans are strongly encouraged to apply. The discipline and teamwork developed through military service align well with the culture we are building.

To Apply

Send a brief message introducing yourself and include:

• Your experience level
• Any relevant skills or trade background
• Contact information

Please include a brief note about your experience and why working in the hardwood flooring trade interests you.

We are currently scheduling interviews and look forward to meeting people who want to build something meaningful in the trade.

—
Beautiful Wood Floors
Serving Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, and surrounding communities