Toby Merrill with a medallion he made at an NWFA school. Merrill is a new NWFA Regional Instructor.
As happens so often, Toby Merrill didn’t plan on wood flooring being his career. After high school he headed to college in Monterey, Calif., to be a marine biologist, but his second semester ended abruptly when his father passed away. After coming home to the Chicago area, he returned to working for his older brother Dave’s wood flooring business, where he had worked the previous summer. After eight years, he had the opportunity to start his own company, Walk on Wood.
Technically, they are competitors, but that hasn’t been a problem between the siblings. “We live five minutes apart, but we’re in a very large market, and in the 13 years I’ve had my own company, we’ve only knowingly crossed paths about three times,” he says.
In fact, his involvement with the National Wood Flooring Association happened when he was on a trip with Dave; they decided to head to Las Vegas on a whim for the Surfaces trade show. At the show, they attended a demonstration by NWFA member Chris Zizza of Westwood, Mass.-based C&R Flooring on color putties and repairs. They gave him some good-natured heckling during the demo and ended up having beers with him after the show. The connection led to Merrill attending a workshop about reclaimed flooring, hand-scraping and other advanced skills at the NWFA headquarters the following summer, and that experience triggered a fundamental shift in his mindset.
“I was amazed at guys like Joe Rocco and Randy Harris showing me floors I had never dreamed of,” he recalls. “I always thought I was good at floors, but then I realized just how much more there was to learn—how much more there was to the industry than I had previously thought.”
It also changed his attitude about NWFA. He recalls that he told NWFA Brett Miller after the school, “I thought NWFA was a bunch of nerds who didn’t know what was happening in the real world.”
Soon he was going to more schools and the NWFA Expo, and, before long, helping at the schools. “It’s very cool to work to create and teach and see the light bulb go on for people who maybe haven’t seen it before,” he says. “At every class I’ve participated in, I’ve met people I call for advice or they call me for advice or we exchange pictures.”
To see where Merrill is teaching in 2016, and to see the full NWFA training schedule, consult the NWFA website.
