This may be Lenny Hall’s first year as an official National Wood Flooring Association Regional Instructor, but Hall has already logged hundreds of hours teaching at NWFA schools over the last two decades. The owner at Endurance Floor Company (West Plank, Fla.) has worked in the wood flooring business since he was 16, but, like so many of his colleagues, he never intended to be a wood floor pro. He began college with a double major of physics and chemistry, with a minor in mathematics. (“I intended to be a cool version of Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory,” he says.) But missing a grant deadline for his sophomore year sent him packing to Florida to work at Endurance Floor where he had previously worked the past two summers as a gopher to two installers at the company, his father and uncle. Hall also did part-time gigs as a DJ and a breakdance teacher to earn money to get back to college. Of those three jobs, the wood flooring career was the one that stuck (although he says teaching breakdancing was the most lucrative at the time).
“I ended up enjoying what I was doing at Endurance so much that I never went back to school,” Hall says. With his father, uncle and other experienced workers mentoring him through his early years, then owner, Eugene Knupp, subsequently chose Hall—at the ripe age of 21—as the successor to the business. “One day I was working alongside my dad and uncle, and the next day, I was their boss! They still laugh about it to this day.”
Around 1984 he read about Randy Yost, a contractor in Texas, who was doing expensive floors around the world. It inspired him to make his first hand-made inlay, a mariner’s compass that same year, for a client. Word spread in the design community, and “doing borders, medallions and inlays became routine for nearly every job,” Hall says.
In 1996 a client approached Hall with a request for a unique inlay, and that request became Hall’s first Floor of the Year winner—a freeform vine with flowers running through the floor. At the time, Hall had never heard of the NWFA or Floor of the Year, but a local distributor told him he should enter the floor. Before long, Hall was teaching at many NWFA schools and on the board of directors.
Over the years, Hall has many great memories of teaching at wood flooring schools, particularly teaching alongside wood flooring greats such as Daniel Boone, Wayne Lee, Tom Peotter, Chuck Crispin and Mark Scheller. He also laughs remembering when he would teach the mathematics of medallion design at the Advanced School. “To this day, that geometry lesson is still referred to as ‘Lenny’s Math!’” Hall says.
“I must say it’s an honor and a privilege to be considered good enough by my peers to be a teacher,” Hall says. “I think it’s a disservice to the industry to let any knowledge die out with the owner. I certainly could have used the help 30 years ago instead of learning it the hard (and expensive) way, and it would not have taken me so long! I’d like to know that I helped or inspired someone to succeed in whatever they do.”
