Jay Hardwood Floor Services

Jay Hardwood Floor Services is a one-person hardwood flooring shop on Essex Street in Swampscott, and the Better Business Bureau puts its start date at January 1994 — more than three decades of floors worked out of the same North Shore town. The BBB lists Jay Vu as president, the company as incorporated in 2017, and the payroll as a single employee. Its BBB grade is an A+, though the business has not sought BBB accreditation. What's missing is the part homeowners usually lean on: nobody has posted a review on that BBB page, so there is no written account from a past customer to weigh. A long-running, very small operation with almost no public paper trail is a genuinely hard call from the outside. If you're considering him, ask for addresses of recent floors he has installed or refinished nearby and for two or three references you can actually call. With a crew of one, the person quoting the job is the person sanding the floor — which is often exactly what people want, provided you can see the work first.