About

Thank you for visiting our Historic Floor Company website!

 

I often get asked how a tech guy ended up starting and owning a custom wood flooring company.

 

As a kid in the 1970’s I loved to tinker and build model boats and airplanes. During high school and college, I worked manual labor jobs to help pay the bills. After graduation, I married my college sweetheart, and got involved in a start-up business manufacturing disposable medical and consumer products.  I received a crash-course in building businesses through my early efforts in sales management, while also pulling long shifts on the assembly line to meet the demands of our growing business.  Along the way, my wife and I got our first “starter” home, which was a major rehab project.  We did well with that 1930’s brick bungalow and then flipped another rehab in the same neighborhood.  Part of restoring these homes to their original splendor included wood flooring.  While I worked my “day job” by day, our nights and weekends were spent redoing every aspect of these homes.

 

By the mid-1990’s I had found my way into the telecommunications industry as a Sales Rep. I worked my way into executive management for a broadband and cable company, and the never-ending travel was killing me.  By this time, we had started a family and I constantly found myself wondering… how can I spend more time at home with my family and not travel so much?

In 2000, a family vacation to Charleston, South Carolina provided the inspiration I was looking for. I was bitten by the bug of old historic buildings and early American history.  Back in St. Louis, we decided to build our own home based on those historic buildings. Inspired by the early American Colonial homes that I fell in love with in the coastal South, we designed and built a Federal Revival style home complete with wide plank pine floors that I replicated from Drayton Hall–one of the oldest original homes in South Carolina.

 

Thus, my love of building things was combined with my love for history, and that turned out to be a great connection to other people who shared the same passions. It was the “perfect storm” that resulted in the founding of Historic Floor Company in 2001.  It was a bold decision to go from being a “suit guy” to a “floor guy”, but, that decision was cemented by the overwhelming response to the floors we provided for our discriminating customers, by producing wide plank floors and selling them to those who desired the same authentic look and charm of these period-style floors.

 

Fifteen years later, we continue to design, produce and distribute a broad range of wide plank floors that honor the type of floors that influenced and built America.

 

We thank you for your support as we continue to produce some of the most historically accurate wide plank wood floors that are made in the USA.

 

Kind regards,

 

Steve P. Lauer

President & CEO, Historic Floor Company