Wood Floor of the Week: A ‘Mamba Mentality’ While Revamping Lakers-Themed Barbershop Floor

Since he began operating Design Tech Custom Flooring Inc. in Torrance, Calif., two years ago, Joshua Gomez has always hustled to grow and improve his wood floor business. So when he noticed the worn maple floor at a barbershop where he’d taken his son, Gomez offered his services. The owner took Gomez’s card, noting the floor hadn’t been refinished in the roughly 10 years since the shop opened. When the pandemic reared its ugly head earlier this year, Gomez got the call. As with many small businesses across the country, the Lawndale, Calif.-based barbershop was forced to close its doors.

"He was shut down and he couldn't do anything,” Gomez says. “So he took the time to revamp the whole place with a new look and a new aesthetic.”

The centerpiece of the barbershop’s original floor was a Los Angeles Lakers logo, which had ambered and was riddled with scratches and scuffs from a decade of patrons seeking haircuts and sports talk. During the renovation, the owner knocked a wall down to expand the room, and Gomez brought in new maple boards to install where the wall had been, matching them with the existing floor.

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Gomez then sanded the floor with 40-, 60-, 80-, 100-, 120-grit using the big machine and multi-head sander and added two coats of water-based sealer. He abraded the floor again before calling in a painter he works with who specializes in floor logos. The logo was updated to include a half court line and given Lakers championship stars orbiting around it. When the logo was done, Gomez abraded again and applied two coats of water-based finish.

As he worked amid the global pandemic and in a community still mourning the loss of Lakers legend Kobe Bryant earlier this year, the floor took on an added significance for Gomez.

"I was talking to the owner after the project and I said, ‘This is more than just a floor for me,’” Gomez recalls. “[The barbershop] was shut down, and the owner was doing what he could during the pandemic to make money, and I was like, 'We live in L.A. This is a championship team that everybody looks up to worldwide. Kobe Bryant, he died, and he was a big name. And we are over here revamping.’”

Gomez cites Bryant’s “Mamba mentality”––an outlook in which Bryant, known as the “Black Mamba,” praised hard work and total dedication in the face of adversity––as one that has inspired him in the dark times and in his hustle to always be improving. 

“If you want to get cliché about it, this is a symbolic floor for me, because it's just like, hey, it doesn't matter what happens in life, we're still going to keep moving forward,” Gomez says. “Where there's a will, there's a way. We're going to make it happen.”

Abrasives: Bona US, Norton Abrasives | Big machine, Buffer, Edger: American Sanders | Finish: Loba-Wakol | Paint: Bona US