CLARKS SUMMIT – John Mirabelli looked down at the hardwood floors in his kitchen, thought back to 1997 when he was 15 years old, and laughed.
“I used to skip school to go to work and do this,” he said. “That was a long time ago.”
Mirabelli owns Floor Excellence, a limited liability company which refinishes, cleans and installs hardwood floors, and installs vinyl floor coverings. His career in flooring began after a neighbor asked young John if he wanted to earn a few dollars on a Saturday by helping the Clarks Summit man refinish floors.
Six years later, in 2003, Mirabelli bought the company. Including the owner, three people are on the payroll. Business, Mirabelli said, has never been better.
“Winters used to be slow, but we pretty much had every week full all winter long,” he said. “And this summer’s going to be very busy.”
Vinyl flooring remains a popular flooring choice for many homeowners, but Mirabelli believes there will always be a demand for floors made from hardwoods. He is counting on the continued popularity of the covering since his enterprise survives because of real wood.
Refinishing jobs bring in about 85 percent of revenues at Floor Excellence, Mirabelli said, and most of those efforts require four working days.
“A day to sand and, if we stain, we try to stain it that day,” he explained.
Mirabelli uses a combination of walk-behind belt sanders and edging sanding machines to remove the polyurethane or wax layer down to the wood. Many of the scratches and scuffs that appear on hardwood floors are actually marks in the top coating.
To apply stains to the exposed hardwood, Mirabelli and his employees use 10-inch staining pads. Mirabelli has used stains from Minwax since he bought Floor Excellence, but will soon switch to stains made by PoloPlaz – the same firm which supplies the polyurethanes he puts atop the stained floors.
Due to the time frames required to perform the work, and the days that pass while waiting for floors to dry, Mirabelli and his employees frequently have multiple jobs going simultaneously.
“Last week, we were out in Tunkhannock and all the way down to Bear Creek,” he said. “There’s lots of traveling involved.”
Coats of polyurethane are applied in the morning on the following days, again using pads. Mirabelli said he sometimes notices the smell of polyurethane when he is on a large refinishing project, but normally is unbothered by the odor.
“I use an oil-based polyurethane,” Mirabelli said. “I like the old-school poly. I’m not a water-based poly fan.”
Mirabelli charges about $3 per square foot for a typical refinishing job. The majority of the work is for residential customers, but Floor Excellence trucks and trailers are frequently dispatched so crews can refinish the floors in apartment buildings.
“We do a lot of commercial apartments,” Mirabelli said. “A lot of them. In Scranton, they’re doing a lot of remodeling in old buildings, and we’ve done quite a few of them.”
Throughout its existence, Floor Excellence has never had a showroom. Mirabelli discussed the business while sitting at his kitchen table, in a house down the highway from 103 Park Blvd., his former home and where he still parks his trucks in a high-visibility area beside Routes 6 and 11. A sign on the side of the garage promotes Floor Excellence to passersby.
“I get a handful of calls of people looking for a showroom,” Mirabelli said. “But mostly I just take samples out to a site if people want new wood, and we pick it out from there.”
To advertise the business, the Floor Excellence name and logo appear on the sides of the quarter-midget and slingshot race cars driven by Connor Mirabelli, John’s 10-year-old son, at Pocono Quarter Midget Raceway and Hamlin Speedway.
John Mirabelli has posted, on Floor Excellence’s Facebook page, many photographs of past flooring jobs, and the firm’s vehicles are wrapped with signage that shows glistening hardwoods. But referrals, according to the owner, are what bring in the largest number of new accounts.
Smartphones allow people to easily search for information about flooring, though Mirabelli is not convinced such technology has made consumers better educated about the subject.
“Some people will see a laminate floor on the internet and they want that on their solid floor,” Mirabelli said. “Well, you can’t make it that color. The laminates are pictures – they’re printed. So, trying to make real wood look like fake doesn’t work.”
