Old houses are like onions.

You keep peeling back layers and crying.

I'll preface by saying my house was built in the 1820's.

Last Saturday I was relaxing reading a book for the first time in months. SWMBO walks in, looks at the carpet and says "This needs to go." I agree. It's ugly white (ish) berber in what is a main entraceway for the entire house, which is also a farm. You can imagine the stains.

I grab a pair of gloves and a utility knife and 20 minutes later I have a bare floor.

Hey that doesn't look too bad. Lets order some new hardwood flooring (solid cherry because SWMBO). Boom. Done.

But wait. Why does the floor feel squishy over here? WTF? You're kidding me...

They put a floor over a floor and shimmed everything to make it level(ish). But there's nothing but strapping supporting 18" of floor near the sliding glass door. E36 M3.

And they ran water lines BETWEEN the old and new floors with almost no insulation.

Hmm, some of the old floor is super squishy too "WHILE I'M IN HERE"

Oh for the love of Christ there's an older floor under the old floor, which was under the new floor under the carpet. Where's Xibit?

I guess it's all coming out and getting replaced from the joists up.

At least I can actually insulate things now - the room is perpetually cold without the wood stove running and the forced hot air ducts are completely uninsulated. Previous owners suck.

sometimes I am sad I don't own a home anymore, but then I read threads like this and am happy I have a landlord to yell at.

excavated*

Nothing brings out the good enough like home ownership. Fortunately for the next owners of my house I'm anal retentive about details. If I open it up and it's wrong it gets replaced.

I was hoping you were going to discover a beautiful original hardwood floor under that carpet. This reminds me of the time our dog dug through the 6 layers of linoleum that the previous owners laid down in the kitchen. We removed the remaining linoleum to discover a plywod sub floor with a circular removeable cutout. Well, that's interesting. Gtta check out what's under there, right? Under the plywood was a manhole cover, and under that was the original hand dug terra cotta lined ~40 foot deep well, with water still in it. It's no longer in use, as we have a much deeper well in the front yard. We looked for any sign of a body or sunken treasure, but found only cave crickets.

I love old houses. Looking at the miscellaneous notches in the old timbers under your floor, I'd bet they were reused from another building.

I demoed a cotton shed out at my parents house. The timbers were obviously reused from somewhere else, and had Roman numbers on them. That was the straightest and prettiest pine you will ever see.

Good luck with the repairs. Looks a lot like the kitchen floor at my last house. By the time all the soft spots had been removed, there was nothing left but floor joists.

Another 10 minute job gone bad ......

Did you go all the way to dirt? In Massachusetts? In winter?
Now I don't feel so bad about the tree in my attic.

At least old floor #1 should yield some excellent reclaimed wood for projects. I'd be making tons of craftman style furniture right now. Even if you don't like it, you'll be able to sell it for enough to cover the cost of the new flooring.

EastCoastMojo wrote: I was hoping you were going to discover a beautiful original hardwood floor under that carpet. This reminds me of the time our dog dug through the 6 layers of linoleum that the previous owners laid down in the kitchen. We removed the remaining linoleum to discover a plywod sub floor with a circular removeable cutout. Well, that's interesting. Gtta check out what's under there, right? Under the plywood was a manhole cover, and under that was the original hand dug terra cotta lined ~40 foot deep well, with water still in it. It's no longer in use, as we have a much deeper well in the front yard. We looked for any sign of a body or sunken treasure, but found only cave crickets.

Did you do this?:

Because I would have.

mazdeuce wrote: Did you go all the way to dirt? In Massachusetts? In winter? Now I don't feel so bad about the tree in my attic.

I gotta hear this.

And Dave: this kind of thing makes restoring old houses fun.

When you don't live there.

Sometimes you just have to laugh.ThThere's more invested in piss poor repair than it would have taken to do it right the first time. And I'll also second the reclaimed lumber furniture idea. There's money there.

looks just like my upstairs bathroom floor did along the wall of my house. it would flex down a good 2 inches. someone replaced the tub drain and just decided the could cut it off the wall and brace it with a 2x4. Im just glad i didnt have to fix a giant room!

Awesome. I love it.

I thought our house was bad with 4 layers of linoleum (3/8 ply, linoleum, 3/8 ply, linoleum, etc). right on top of a beautiful hardwood floor.

This is worse.

Sounds like the story of the kitchen in my parents' 1770 farmhouse. By the time we got the bad floor out we realized all the exterior wall studs were rotted up about 24" from the bottom. One whole end of the house was effectively hanging on clapboard siding with wire lath and stucco over it.

Next time tell her to shush it and just rent a carpet cleaner.

More jobs like that, and your 1820's house is going to become a George Washington axe.

Just out of curiosity, with there being bare dirt under the joists, what will you use to insulate the space? Will you do some sort of vapor barrier?

In reply to asoduk:

I'm putting in vapor barrier and r19 insulation between the new joists.

Yikes!

FWIW, that first (lowest layer) floor is not a floor. It's a subfloor. It's supposed to be there. The standard method until very recently was a double layer floor- the subfloor was laid as the frame was going up, and then the floor was laid over that (once the plaster work was completed, in order to have a good clean surface to lay finished flooring over). Sometimes the subfloor was laid diagonally for strength (before plywood). Note that the 1st layer goes under your walls, and the second layer does not.

I know- it doesn't make any difference to your current predicament. But I thought you might feel a little better to know that you only have 1 inappropriate layer!

Looks like a fun way to spend the holidays- Merry Christmas!

Didn't your mom teach you to stop picking at it?

That house is like an onion to me because I bet it could make me cry.

Maybe you should jut dig a basement while you have all three of the floors out?

T.J. wrote: Maybe you should jut dig a basement while you have all three of the floors out?

I have an uncle who did just that up in Massachusetts. His house had been built on a hillside in 1885 and by 1985 had settled 6" on the downhill side. He jacked it up and built a real foundation under it as well as a two car garage and three additional rooms.

A LOT of 5 gallon buckets of sand hauled out there!

This floor reminds me why I always say "never buy a house older than you are".

KyAllroad wrote: This floor reminds me why I always say "never buy a house older than you are".

but almost all houses built since 1980 are garbage.