Our story

Heartwood Flooring started in a Longfellow garage in 2011, the same year Erik Lindqvist decided that doing floors the right way was more valuable than doing them the fast way. He had spent his teens helping his uncle refinish the old-growth fir and pine floors common in Minneapolis craftsmen and bungalows — the kind of work where you learn to read a floor before you touch it, to find the moisture, to check the structure, and to understand that a beautiful finish on a bad subfloor is a warranty callback waiting to happen. When he went out on his own, he brought that approach with him and built every hire around it.

The Twin Cities flooring market gave Heartwood room to grow. Minneapolis housing stock skews old — a huge share of the owner-occupied homes that call us were built between 1910 and 1960, with original hardwood that has been covered by carpet for forty years and forgotten. Uncovering those floors, diagnosing what they need, and deciding honestly whether to refinish or replace is work that requires experience and integrity in equal measure. We built our reputation on calling it correctly — telling a Linden Hills homeowner her floors can be refinished three more times instead of selling her a replacement she does not need, and telling a St. Louis Park homeowner that the soft spot under his kitchen floor is a subfloor failure that has to be fixed before any finish floor goes down.

Today Heartwood operates two installation crews and a dedicated refinishing team working across the Twin Cities. Our installers are NWFA-certified, our moisture readings are documented on every job, and every written quote is flat-rate — the number before the job starts is the number on the invoice. Over 1,800 Minneapolis families trust us with their floors, and most of them found us through a neighbor who had us in their home first. That is the metric we care about most.