Saggy Bottom Floors...

Claire Gritten
Jul 15, 2015
2 min read

Bouncy Bouncy Bouncy... Bouncing is what Tiggers and Gummi Bears do best. But our floors are giving them a run for their money.

Out of fear of falling through the floor, Mike lifted a section to see what was going on down there. There be dragons... Well... Not quite, thankfully! Turns out that the wall strut was a wee bit rotten... Some might say non existent... As in powder. Dragon poo??? :-) So, off to the Poleyard he went and bought a nice chunk of 2x4 treated beam of wood, stuck it in there and no more bouncing..Ok, less bouncing.

*Also I may be making this sound a little bit easier than it is. I wasn't there, you see. I was on set while Mike (the man who charges the energiser bunny) was making the room liveable. He apparently physically lifted an entire section of the floor, boards and beams manually with a hammer (his favorite tool) and a pry bar, then placed the new wall plate in place. And dropped the floor on to it. Voila .. No more bounce or sag. YAY!*

The rest of the renovations went as follows:

Some sweeping... Ahem! Because Claire can paint canvases NOT walls. And does both untidily! And Mike HATES painting and therefore goes in with the attitude of, "It must be done, I'll do it properly, ONCE!"

We hired a mother of a floor sander, and sanded the floor wall to wall. It will be the last time this floor can take a sanding, as the oregan pine timber was so corrugated through neglect, that Mike had to sand it across the grain, and with the grain, and across the grain to get a semblance of flatness. Prior to sanding, we were reminded of the roads team who resurfaced our M5 highway a few years back ... Boing badoing... Everywhere. This industrial floor sander never really gets into the corners so we used a car polisher, with a sanding disk, to do the corners and edges neatly. We used a car polisher, as it has a slower rotation speed than an angle grinder. BTW, both look exactly alike, so avoid confusion when asking for one at the rental shops.

Lastly, we varnished it with Dulux WoodGuard because the store stopped stocking our usual brand of polyurethane, ColorTone. And can I tell you, we are so disapponited. It does NOT dry in the time stated by manufaturer. As in dry dry, like get hard. It's just sticky and nasty. It failed! For whatever reason, it just failed.

On the bright side, it looks much better than when we started and we accept that this was just a temporary fix so that we can move in. The rest of the floors will wait until we can find a stockist who stocks our favorite brand of polyurethane varnish.

Next phase: Replace ALL the skirtings.

Next next phase: Re-do the floors with polyurathane, later, as in a few months. OR... maybe rip or the floors out and pour concrete, intead?

THEME SONG: Saggy Bottom Speedo Swimmer by Desmond and the Tutus

But there is NO ok-ish recording of this song on the internet so here is: Pretoria Girls instead.