Tuesday, December 06, 2005

The Floor Diaries, Part IV

Monday 1140 hours

At last the underlying floor is revealed. It's mostly hardwood under there, which is what we hoped. But it's in pretty bad shape. Paint smudges everywhere, weird shims made out of what appear to be roof shingles, termite damage, mysterious cuts, patches made from unfinished, mismatched boards. The contractor guys are dismayed at best. They say we really need to take out this floor, and fix the subfloor, and then put a new hardwood floor on top of it. Oh, and the reasonably nice hardwood floor in the kitchen was put down directly on top of this kind of old hardwood, which is Not Done anymore. But maybe we can just ignore that for now.

Big glue patch from the font door. It appears they used to have tile right under the front door. Why they heck didn't they preserve that tile when they put in the carpet?


Why is there a deep curved slot cut into the floor underneath the carpet? Bandsaw practice? Slot cars?


I'm the next room when I hear Don say, "OK, now THAT's a problem". I come out to see that he's found this power wiring underneath the carpet with a big nail driven right through it. Is it live? Is it safe? Hmmmmm.


We expected to some evidence under the carpet of where the old room boundaries were before the house was expanded. We had hoped they did something tidier than this, but that was probably overly optimistic.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh boy! The flooring in pictures and greater detail than on the phone last night is a bit overwhelming. It is going to be quite a project, I'm afraid. If it's any help, you have my at a distance support for the duration. Mom

Wiz Knitter said...

Wow, now I know what you guys have been up to for the last couple of weeks! (Mary's been blogging about as much as I have, which is very little.) I just got my sister's Christmas letter, all about their remodel -- their new floors went in last week. It's a challenging thing to do -- good luck!