Hardwood Floors April/May 2026

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UNDER PRESSURE Restoration By Burt Bollinger

Water damage is one of the few things that can put even the most durable hardwood floor at immediate risk, especially when that floor already has stood for more than a century. At Carnall Hall at the University of Arkansas, a broken pipe threatened to do exactly that, saturating thousands of square feet of a 120-year-old heart pine floor and raising the question of whether it could be saved at all. W t d i f th

Tom Stephenson and Jessica Hall of Heritage Hardwood Floors were contacted by a commercial client they had worked with previously about the restoration effort. They recently had completed work on another campus building when they were asked to evaluate the damage at Carnall Hall, one of the university’s original structures that had been converted into a hotel. A pipe had broken on the third floor, allowing water to move through the building and affect roughly 5,000 square feet of flooring across multiple levels.

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