The concept of World Changers is this: get a bunch of folks (250+) who don’t know each other from around the country together in one location to fix the homes of other folks who can’t do it themselves. Of course, there are certain eligibility requirements that must be met before you can have your house worked on for free. Age and relative health are certainly factors to be considered but financial resources are also considered. Long story short, to get World Changers to work on your house you have to be 1) old, 2) poor 3) or sickly; or any combination thereof. The homeowners my crew helped out this past week fell into category #1.
The 250+ folks I mentioned above are divided up into crews of 6-15 and sent to work for a week on a couple dozen homes. My crew was called, in a witty play on words, the “Level Heads.” It was more or less an accurate description.
The problem with the residence was two-fold. First off, their bathroom floor had water damage so severe that the only thing keeping them from falling through the floor was the two layers of sheet vinyl flooring. The particle board underneath the vinyl was so rotted that after I pulled up the vinyl I could poke my finger through the floor to their crawlspace. Normally a floor installer would walk away from a situation like that. But not us, oh no, we were in it ‘till the end.
After I found out I was the only one on the crew with any experience installing vinyl flooring (I actually have quite a bit of experience) I was saddled with the responsibility to revamp this bathroom. The other task with this residence was the addition of a bathroom onto the master bedroom. I had very little to do with that part, most of what I did dealt with the Pandora’s box in the existing bathroom.
After tearing up a good part of the sub floor (picture1, picture2) we realized that we were in this for the long-haul. The floor joists were stable but the supplementary supports of 1×4s were rotted and needed to be replaced. We ended up cutting new 3/4” plywood to replace the rotted particle board.
My dad is a professional floor installer; the best out there. He taught me everything I know about floor installation and he’s always been a stickler for perfection; he also taught me to be the same. This is where my dad needs to stop reading. You hear that, dad? Stop! The problem with my desire to do a perfect job here was we were dealing with local government funds and didn’t have the money to afford 1/4” underlayment to put over the 3/4” sub floor. The new vinyl would be installed directly on top of the sub floor; screws and all.
It really was an atrocity to have to do a less-than-perfect job. It went against everything my father taught me but we did the best we could with the resources at hand. I had to keep telling myself that compared to what they had before, this new floor would be infinitely better. At the very least, I said, they could “use it” without fear of breaking the floor.
Like I said, we didn’t have the ideal materials so instead of putting down 1/4” underlayment I had to float the whole floor. For those of you not privy to floor installation terminology that means I had to use a sort of liquid underlayment to make the sub floor smooth and even. I was only able to get it smooth and even to a point though because in some places there were 1” gaps and 1/2” drops. I did the best I could though and really ended up with a nice finished product. In fact, after putting the vinyl down you could barely tell where the sub floor was uneven. Dang, I’m good. (picture3, picture4)
To finish it off I put base shoe around all the edges which isn’t shown in the pictures. It had been a long time since I got that kind of satisfaction out of my work. Thanks, dad, for teaching me to do something so few people can. I have a new respect for your work now.
