Flooring Red Flags in San Antonio: What the Quote Says, and What the Company Says

Most flooring red flags are boring. They’re missing lines, fuzzy units, and a total nobody can explain once the floor is up.

Read the quote first. Then listen to how the company explains what it wrote and what it says about itself.

Part one: what the quote tells you

One number, no lines

One big number isn’t a quote you can compare. It’s a total with nothing behind it.

If a change order shows up later, there’s no baseline for what was included at the start. Make them show the area, waste, material rate, and every add-on on separate lines.

Some crews don’t itemize. Fine. Just know you’re buying a verbal scope, and verbal scopes get hard to remember when the slab is bare.

A square-foot price quoted before anyone measured

A phone rate is orientation. It isn’t a final quote.

Nobody can see the slab through the phone. They don’t know whether it’s flat, what the old floor is hiding, how much mortar is stuck to it, or where the carpet seams will land. Until somebody walks the house, a firm number is still a starting number.

No waste percentage anywhere on the page

Waste gets added to the measured area. About 10% is normal for an ordinary straight-lay floor. Diagonal and herringbone patterns run 15 to 25%. There’s no industry standard setting the number. Not in the residential carpet installation standard. Not from the laminate association either.

It’s the estimator’s call. If it’s buried in one blended total, you can’t see what they used. Make them show measured area and waste as two separate lines.

A cheap tile demolition price with nothing said about the mortar

Cheap tile demolition gets expensive when the mortar isn’t included.

The tile comes up. The thinset bonded to the slab doesn’t. Leave enough of it behind and your next floor won’t glue down without leveling the slab first. Now the cheap demolition line has pushed you into a floating floor you didn’t choose or a leveling bill bigger than the savings.

Ask what happens to the mortar. Then ask who pays if the slab needs leveling. Do it before demolition starts.

Nothing about moisture, or a generic chart instead of your product's number

Concrete holds water. If the slab is too wet for the floor you picked, the flooring fails.

No testing line on a glue-down or wood quote over a slab? Ask. A limit pulled from a generic chart? Ask again. That chart may be stricter than your product’s own instructions and could send you into moisture mitigation on a compliant slab.

Neither ASTM test method sets the limit. The product does, often based on the adhesive. Make them show you the number in that document.

Stairs missing from a whole-house quote

Stairs price per step, not per square foot. If you’ve got stairs and no stair line, that quote isn’t for the whole house.

Units mixed together without labels

Square feet across the floor. Linear feet along the wall. Per step on the stairs. If the quote mixes all three without labels, hand it back and ask for the units.

Furniture and appliances not addressed at all

Furniture moving is all over the place. Some crews include it, some charge by the room, and at least one only works in empty houses. Appliance disconnect and reconnect, including pulling and resetting a toilet, isn’t priced in any published source we found.

Missing doesn’t mean included. It means unresolved. Get the work in writing, along with who owns the problem if something leaks after it goes back.

A material price presented as an installed price

You’ll see flooring advertised in this city for a few dollars a square foot, and tile for well under a dollar. Those can be real prices for material sitting on a pallet. They don’t include labor.

Installed is a different number. If one quote is nowhere near the others, ask whether it includes installation before you compare anything else.

Part two: what the company tells you about itself

"We're a licensed flooring contractor in Texas"

Texas doesn’t license flooring contractors. There’s no state flooring license, floor covering license, tile or carpet license, or state residential general contractor or home improvement license. The state licensing agency’s current program list and full set of rules confirm it.

Licensed can still mean something real. An out-of-state license. A state asbestos license. Federal lead certification. An affiliated company’s electrical or plumbing license. A manufacturer certification, city registration, or sales tax permit. One San Antonio flooring page carried genuine license numbers from Arizona, California, and Nevada in its footer.

The word isn’t the problem. A credential with no agency and no number is. Ask which license, who issued it, and what the number is. Then look it up.

A permit fee on a quote for plain floor covering replacement

San Antonio doesn’t require a building permit to replace interior floor coverings in an existing home. Carpet, wood, laminate, and tile are exempt. The city says it three different ways, including on the same one-page application that lists window replacement as permitted work.

So if plain floor replacement has a permit fee, ask which permit and what work triggered it. Structural subfloor or joist repair needs one. Removing a wall does too, along with work touching the slab or foundation. If the scope has moved into one of those jobs, fine. If it hasn’t, ask what the fee is for.

"A crack isolation membrane will handle the Texas clay"

This one is wrong in a very specific way.

Crack isolation membranes are rated for in-plane cracking, roughly a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch of movement in the plane of the slab. Their manufacturers state plainly that they do not protect against out-of-plane movement and are not anti-fracture products.

Differential foundation movement is out-of-plane. A membrane can handle a slab’s own shrinkage cracking. It can’t solve a moving foundation. Those are different jobs.

A pre-1978 house, and nobody mentions the baseboards

If your house was built before 1978 and painted baseboards are coming off, the federal lead renovation rule is very likely in play. The EPA counts the entire surface area of a removed painted component, and one ordinary bedroom's baseboard clears the threshold on its own. Splintered trim counts as demolition of painted surface, which is carved out of the small-job exemption regardless of area.

A paid crew in a house that age should bring this up before the painted baseboards come off. If they don’t, you should.

A confident number for how long to wait after foundation repair

There’s no authoritative answer. No standards body publishes a wait period between foundation repair and installing tile or wood over it.

A firm number may come from useful experience. Just ask whether it’s the crew’s practice or a published requirement. Don’t let one get presented as the other.

Certainty about mold before the floor is up

Nobody knows what’s under the floor until it comes off. A confident promise before that doesn’t tell you much.

The useful answer is what happens if mold turns up. At or above twenty-five contiguous square feet, Texas rules require the contractor to stop immediately, contain it if needed, and tell you a licensed or registered person has to take over. They can’t keep working under the small-area exemption. Ask for that plan before the floor comes up.