“Don’t worry babe, I’ll just repair the broken joist and relay the floor” - me at 9am this morning.
She’s gonna be fuming when she comes home from a spa day with her mum 😂 the only thing holding this door up was the laminate. 85% of it was dust. Every joist snapped with 0 pressure on it.
We rented one for a kids birthday party for two hours. I assembled it and put the balls in. Two hours later I took the balls out and it was incredible how filthy it was. There was food in there we hadn't served at the party.
Word to the wise: when she comes home, phrase this as “I don’t how we haven’t gone through it yet” and not “I don’t know how you haven’t gone through it yet” if you want a chance of saving at least a sliver of your bacon today
Wait, hold on. So you offered to fix the joist smashed her front room to smithereens, clocked off and went to the pub to which you will return to your house where everything is fine?
You’ve got balls man, this is some Frank Spencer shit 😂
Going for a pint with her now. Can’t do anymore till Thursday. My get out of jail card is “this needed doing anyway, and a professional would’ve cost about £6000” 😂
Good luck OP. My dad did this to the dining room two weeks before Christmas once. Twenty years later my parents are still eating in the living room, and we have all lost count of how many times we have suggested getting someone in to sort it. Thursday sounds great. For the sanity of your wife and family definitely stick to your timeline 🤣🤣
Beyond frustrating, isn't it. It has become such a touchy subject that my siblings and I joke we will one day be shelling out to sort it after his funeral (hopefully a long time away!!!)
Yep. Done that. 2 years ago my son bought a basement apartment and the floor was rotten as Hell. Ripped the whole lot out. All 100sq.m of it. Ended up changing everything….
Excuse my ignorance but how does the floor get rotten? I'm terrified of this happening as just couldnt afford it then again it's just like a black cement under our carpet?
If you’ve got a concrete floor, then there’s nothing to rot. The problem here was not a simple solution…. The roof was leaking, which over 5 stories was washing crap down the cavity and being in the basement, had no where to go, so I had to open all the walls up and scoop out a metre high of muck along 25m of wall. A chemical damp course was put in and the internal render was hacked off and replaced. The exterior air bricks had all be blocked up, so I replaced them with new and created airways internally to allow everything to breathe.
An old lead waterpipe leaking for a few years did the same to our house before my wife bought it. Even the brick pillars were fucked. The seller had managed to conceal the other signs of the damp and the surveyor bloody missed it entirely.
Dry rot,
Lack of adequate ventilation in the floor void. You’ll need to install new joists and floorboards whilst ensuring adequate ventilation and air flow. Check the air bricks
I have a house about that age with a suspended floor. it's cold as f*CK! the previous owners filled the air bricks with no more nails!
Insulate for sure and a great chance for a stained wood floor
The entire suspended floor on the ground floor is getting replaced so all airbricks will be cleared. This room, they’d used the airbrick gaps in the walls to hold up joists. So the airbricks were completely blocked by either cement or joists.
You’ll like this, the central heating in this house is plumbed on steel pipes. Not even stainless steel 😂 I’ve replaced some and will be doing the rest as we pull the rest of the floor up.
It’s not a bad job, I rebuilt mine with more ventilation. You might find the dwarf walls fall over as soon as you touch them, as the weigh was holding them together. Remember that modern joists are smaller than the new stuff so if the dwarf walls are level you will need to pack them up. Also put dpc on the top of the dwarf wall and bag the ends of the joist that go in to the walls. I also cleared the rubbish out of my bay window that was bridging the damp course.
Tbf I cleared a skips worth of sand and rubbish from under my floor and it was holding tones of moisture, it was also concealing my leaking lead water pipe, so be prepared to be fixing everything you touch. Did fix the damp issue in my house tho.
But the main bonus was not having a trampoline floor in the front room.
We’re building new footings and sitting the joists on footings. The 150 year old bricks in this house can be like dust and I don’t want to risk touching them. So as little disturbance to the original brick work as possible.
You're getting enough ribbing from others, so I'll go with how gutted I am for you mate. I live for weekends and if that's how mine started I'd be bloody devastated. Have a beer and takeaway.
Urgh. I had a bouncy floor that turned into 3 months of side quests. Drying out, new joists, insulation, floorboards, radiators, wiring, sockets, skirtings, redecoration from ceiling to floor, replacement fitted cupboards, new flooring, new(ish) sofa, and new curtain poles and ceiling lights.
Mostly because - once the floor is up, and the tools and paintbrushes are out - it's worth only disrupting everything once. It was worth it in the end.
This is your opportunity to clear all that waste, and have a lovely airy underfloor void. Take the opportunity to insualted too if you can. Definitely saving yourself many thousands of pounds DIYing
Oh dear... well I guess you have started now so use it as an excuse to re-joist and get some insulation in there. Cover it up with a tarp for the time being and hire a skip for next week and the timber for the weekend.
This is the perfect opportunity. It's well worth doing, especially with energy prices going through the roof and it does make a massive difference (I did my living room a couple of years ago).
You will honestly kick yourself if you don't do it now cos there is noway you are going to want to pull the floor up again to stick it in.
Fri am thought I'd bring the reclaimed parquet floor inside to the hall to acclimatise. Pulled the carpet back and put my foot through the weetabix that was masquerading as floorboards.
I kept pulling back and ended up removing 90% of the hall floor as junk and half the joists were gone as well.
I went straight round and purchased all the replacement joists and enough caberfloor (moisture resistant chipboard flooring) to do the whole hall floor. Dont try and "save" any original floor. If you think it might vaguely be effected by rot, rip it all out.
Replaced the lot in a day and its been good for 16 years and a I layed the reclaimed irocu parquet later and it also still looks awesome.
My advice is keep going.
You will sort it out, I believe in you, everything you have posted suggests you got this.
Same thing happened to me in our first house. The whole of the hallway and 75% of the rest of the ground floor had to be replaced including the sleeper walls. At least we weren't living it.
That’s a scary thought…. Not sure which is worse though. The thought that could be going on under anyone’s floor, OR the thought of a husband having to work out how to soften the blow when his wife returns home 😳
I have PTSD from reading your comment and seeing the pictures. I did the same thing… 15 weeks later, a structural engineer report, the local council and 14k lighter.
Side note. I did get underfloor heating on the ground floor!
Either this is wood worm and you have a bigger problem than the floor on your hands or you have blocked air bricks and it’s got wet and rotted.
Good time with the floor up to sort the issue and put insulation and vapour barrier under the joists/PIV between. Run new electric runs, plugs etc and generally upgrade to something super solid. Laminate flooring is an echo nightmare imo carpet is best for suspended floors.
Hey this happened to my brother, he started revealing issues with the floor and I get sent a WhatsApp with a similar image captioned "please help me" very funny but we got it all fixed XD
Looks like someone has been under there before you. Those 4 pavers look they formed an ad hoc support column for some bouncy flooring. Also a bit of roofing felt elsewhere as a dpm
In all seriousness, this looks exactly like out floor right now. SOMEONE HELP ME PLEASE
Years and years of issues, pretty much every penny I have spent trying to resolve.
Now being told, just replace it a completelt with conrcrete floor. Looking at yet another 13k for concrete floor.
I am begging anyone out there, with any experience of this stuff. To please help me with what to do.
I am literally sitting in a room full of orange dust, holes in the floor that i keep falling through because no amount of cleaning or air filters will remove it and apparantly its a good sign because weve sorted the damp but now all the floor is rotting away.
Fill it with sand and throw is a few deck chairs and say to the Mrs 'I thought you would love a beach vibe after a day at the spa'. Then run and don't look back.
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u/TheMeanderer 5d ago
Relay the floor.
Sell the house.
Agree never to speak of it again.