Woodworms and tongue removal
The other week we had an electrician in adding a new circuit and to route the cabled we asked them to put them under the floor.
Which in turn meant lifting some tongue and grove floorboards. Which I did with a combination of crowbar and claw hammer. Which although effective did mean that the plank in question wasn’t in a fit state to be put back in. There was a need to get access in a different room so for that one, I used a multi-tool saw to cut the plank which hence meant it could be reused.
Getting the new board in was fiddly due to a couple of things. Firstly the old boards were 15mm thick and the new ones 18mm thick. So several passes with an electric plane were needed to bring them down to the right thickness. The second was the tongue and groove. I’ve solved this in the past by buying wider planks than necessary and planning off the tongue. For this one, I used a chisel to split off the top of the groove, this allowed the new planks to dropped into place. It does leave a small gap between floorboards but this should be handled by the underlay when the carpets get replaced later in the year.
To fix the boards, I drilled a pilot hole and countersink and then screwed them down, there’s going to be more electrical work so the board will need to come up again.
Just as I finished the last plank, I spotted a little patch on the floor, someone has carefully cut a rectangle to cover over a knot hole. “Oh that’s cute, I thought” before realising that the plank was split and probably needed to be replaced.
As I was cutting the plank, it kind of crumbled which was a bit alarming as we had been walking on it the previous week.
Once the plank was out the problem could be seen more clearly, a number of tiny holes were present along the back of the boards.
By tapping on the planks, I could head which ones were solid and which had a duller noise. And hence I could remove and replace the affected boards. I also liberally applied wood worm killer to both the surrounding and new boards. Further reading showed that this was probably the common furniture beetle, there we no recent signs of activity and the wood was very dry. Speculation is that there was a historical wet spillage that wasn’t properly handled. The air bricks are all working fine and the room has no signs of damp.
I’d prepped for the power being off a second time by building a small battery powered mobile router. I didn’t get to use this in anger as I was up in the loft disconnecting some old wiring whilst the power was off. And also this was the day the Vodafone network went down and my data SIM was with Smarty who recently switched to them.
And whilst I was in the loft there was another bad discovery. The water tanks that were used by a partially disconnected water heating system were made from asbestos cement. There was no doubt as they actually had the company name written on them. So specialists have been booked for removing those.
All the electrical work is now done and we’ve got both an EV charger installed and some solar panels with battery storage.
So back to the painting and decorating and hopefully no more surprises.
Posted in: DIY
Tags: floorboards, woodworm
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
