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That one closet in a 1920s house in Dayton ate 3 days of my life and I still see it when I close my eyes
So last month I took a job in an old house near Dayton, and the homeowner wanted carpet in a closet off the master. Sounds like a 45 minute job, right? Wrong. The floor was so out of whack from a hundred years of settling that the tack strip on the far wall turned into a joke, and every time I got one edge locked down the other side popped loose. I pulled the strip, leveled with some patch, waited for it to cure, tried again, and the staple gun kept bouncing on old hardwood that was hiding under three layers of crap. I bet I made 4 trips to my truck for different staples and a different stapler, and I finally just screwed a plywood strip down and tacked into that. Three days total for a closet smaller than my truck bed. The homeowner was nice about it but I was so mad at myself I sat in the driveway for 20 minutes after. What do you all do when a floor is that far gone, do you walk away or just eat it and move on?
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riverb5210d ago
That line about the staple gun bouncing on old hardwood hiding under three layers of crap hit way too close to home. I ran into the same mess in a place over in Springfield and what finally worked for me was to stop fighting the floor and float it instead, lay down 1/4 inch plywood over the whole closet with construction adhesive and screws into the joists, then tack into that like it was a brand new subfloor. It costs you some height at the door but you can shim the threshold easy and the tack strip actually holds. The other thing I learned the hard way is to check for level before I even quote the job, because a closet that bad means the whole room is probably out too. Some floors you can save and some you just have to cover up and move on, no shame in it.
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