Elbow-Joints
Home Tradespeople Useful Links Sermons Sources		WOOD FLOOR PROBLEMS As any of you who have been to my place know, my first floor's floor is very, very unflat, and getting somewhat soft in a few spots. There are also some places where the nails in the floor won't stay nailed, and where the tongue and groove between the floor boards has broken. The good news is that I have almost complete access to the subfloor from underneath, and it looks ok as far as I can tell. So, does anyone have any advice on how to figure out just how bad the damage is and what to do about it? --corwin IMHO, a nail that won't stay nailed is an indication of subfloor damage. My only advice to you is, when you put plywood over the whole thing, be sure to use tongue and groove plywood. I didn't know about it, so when I redid our kitchen floor (because we wanted a working dishwasher, so the old one had to go but the only way to get it out was to take up the floor since the existing floor had been put in since the dishwasher was installed -- does this sound familiar) with regular plywood, the seams now shift next to each other and you can see them through the vinyl flooring. Vinyl flooring does not hide *anything*. The floor should be smooth as a baby's butt over the entire surface you're covering. --russ nelson Umph. What does "getting soft" mean? You say the subfloor looks okay from below, so it sounds like you don't have any dry rot or places where it just isn't properly supported from below. Low-impact fixes first: Warping plus tongue-in-grooves broken? Probably if it's not too bad you can put in diagonal nails to tack the broken-tongue parts back down, countersing and fill with color-matched putty. For the nails-coming-out places, can you screw down and hide screw heads with putty? Probably you aren't in a hurry to go pulling up and replacing large swaths of flooring... --Liz "Getting soft" means that there are spots in the floor where when you step on it, it gives more than the rest of the floor, and more than I am comfortable with. I haven't looked over the entire sub-flooring, but a cursory inspection seems to indicate that the sub-floor is fine. I can't see what it looks like right above the joists (obviously), which is where some of the damage above is, but I suspect if I have a dry rot problem, that would be obvious over a larger stretch than the few inches I can't see over the joists. The floor in question is very not-flat. It slopes up from one wall toward one of the main beams across the basement, then makes a very gentle U from that beam to the other, and then heads down again toward the opposite wall, said sloping running across the short axis of the house and along the direction of the sub-floor planking. I suspect that what is going on is that in the last 115 years or so, the foundation has settled, but the basement floor and columns which sit upon it holding up the joists (what do you call those columns of bricks anyway?) have not (or at least not as much), and so the two large beams which run the long way across the house are now relatively higher than the sills at the edge of the foundation. The floor boards run parallel to these large beams, and this overall motion thus puts stress on the tongues and grooves which lie over or near the beams. It is actually somewhat hard to tell if the tongues and grooves have actually broken or if they have just pulled apart (which seems more likely given the way the floor actually looks, but I don't really feel like I'm sure of what I'm looking at and am loath to actually take up boards without some more knowledge first). >Low-impact fixes first: Warping plus tongue-in-grooves broken? Probably if it's not too bad you can put in diagonal nails to tack the broken-tongue parts back down, countersing and fill with color-matched putty. For the nails-coming-out places, can you screw down and hide screw heads with putty? The soft spots seem a bit more severe than just diagonal nailing and putty could fix, but I don't really know. Certainly it is an appealing solution. I suspect that the screw and putty fix will work quite well for the spots that just have nails coming up. --corwin Corwin, This thing really sounds to me like it includes a big element of house-settling -- the not-staying-nailed is particularly suspicious in this regard. I mean, your house is as old as mine, and those floorboards are wider, which means they accomodate changes in plane less well than the tiny ones I've got. In which case you might have to take up and reset the whole floor (yikes) or at least large parts of it, to accomodate the new, actual plane rather than the old one. "Soft" sounds like gap between board and subfloor? It may need the subfloor to be built up a little in some places to make a flatter surface for the boards. And of course since the settling happens slowly, the boards will be warped and shrunk, too; just maybe not warped enough to accomodate where the floor's ended up. Hmm. I wonder if you put in a layer of that subfloor felt stuff if it would even things out enough? I've never seen it used under wood, but maybe there's some equivalent. Good luck. --Lauren Depending on the age of your house, you may actually have multiple levels of "sub-floor". Parts of our house have as many as *three* "sub-floors"; (original wood, another wood layer laid on at right angles to first, then a newer plywood layer from more recent renovations). Which means you may have dry rot in a layer *between* the hardwood floor and the part you can see from below. Also realize that rot can be sneaky; a piece of wood may *look* okay (especially on the not-rotted side), but the solid-looking part will be thin as veneer. One of our porch beams was like that; it was a 6x6 beam that seemed a little punky on the end. We took up the decking and started chopping away at the punky parts; by the time we hit solid wood, all we had was a 1/2" shell of material; everything inside was gone. You couldn't tell from the outside, though... Try sticking an icepick or similar instrument into the subfloor underneath the suspected soft spots; you may be in for a rude surprise... --Jim Paradis Back to top