Flooring in El Macero

Conditions in El Macero

El Macero sits at about 36 feet in Yolo County. The regional Sacramento Valley record shows summer air cycling widely within each day rather than staying uniformly dry. In the National Weather Service publication "Climate of Sacramento, California" (revised August 2010), average relative humidity at Sacramento is 78 percent at 4 AM against 30 percent at 4 PM in July, a swing of roughly 48 points inside the same day. Those are Sacramento readings taken about 12 miles from El Macero, not local measurements.

Subfloor and Foundation Work

El Macero is the most uniform ground in this service area by a wide margin. USDA-NRCS SSURGO maps only four soil units inside the CDP boundary, and one of them — Sycamore silt loam, drained — covers 90.1% of it. That unit has a linear extensibility of 2.9%, which places it in the lowest of the four NRCS shrink-swell classes, and no unit anywhere in El Macero exceeds 4.6%. Nothing here is even rated high, let alone very high. Two details are worth carrying into a job. The map units are all mapped on 0 percent slopes and the dominant one carries the "drained" phase, which marks a soil whose natural wetness has been artificially lowered; low-lying basin ground of that kind is flat to begin with but its moisture regime is managed rather than natural, so crawl space and slab moisture readings deserve attention even though the shrink-swell risk is low. The second is the coincidence with the housing data: 86.4% of El Macero's homes were built across three consecutive decades and 90.1% of its ground is a single soil, which makes this one of the few communities where what is found under one floor is a reasonable guide to the next.

Foundation type is the first thing that narrows the material list, and concrete narrows it hard. A slab rules out a nailed-down solid wood floor and puts the decision between engineered, vinyl plank, laminate, and tile — each of which handles concrete differently. We test the slab for moisture before recommending any of them, because the test result, not the budget, is what determines which methods are actually available.

A raised floor opens the material list back up — a sound wood subfloor accepts nail-down, glue-down, and floating installations alike. The condition of the crawlspace is what we check first, since a moisture problem underneath will eventually reach whatever we put on top.

Source: NAHB analysis of the Census Bureau Survey of Construction, foundation type by region (2024)

El Macero Homes We Work In

ACS 2020-2024 five-year estimates count 360 housing units, 86.4% of which were built between 1960 and 1989 — 31.7% in 1970-1979, 28.6% in 1960-1969, and 26.1% in 1980-1989. The sample records no units built before 1960. This matches the community's origin as a planned golf-course development: the clubhouse, course, and first 175 lots came to market in spring 1961. El Macero's 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s homes tend to bring their own surprises once the old floor comes up — subfloor thickness, previous patches, and height differences at doorways. We plan transitions and thresholds around what's actually under there rather than around a nominal drawing.