When you have a whole raft of home improvements planned and a rather limited piggy bank with which to pay for them, then something as drastic as needing to change the flooring can be absolutely devastating. This happened to a near neighbour – they were systematically upgrading each room in the downstairs part of their stone conversion . . . it was a slow but well organised operation. It had involved swapping two rooms around completely, moving plumbing and then changing a window and door placement in a sunroom attached to the main sitting room. Each part of the project was flowing nearly seamlessly until there was a problem with the flooring in the sitting room. The original roof on the sunroom had been leaking over the years – there was an aircon unit placed along the top roofline which may have caused some stressing, causing puddles to appear. Time for an invesitgation finally arose and the very experienced odd jobbing building/plumber/project manager traced a problem back to something under the sitting room floor. Once they had raised a section of the much admired parquet flooring, it became pretty obvious that water ingress or leakage had been going on for a long time. Upon further checking, it seemed that the whole floor was damp underneath – every single supporting joist beam under the parquet was damp and in places was actually just dust.
Once the owners had gotten over the shock of the situation, they had to take the decision to remove all the flooring in the sitting room and have the area dried out completely. The family decamped to the sunroom which offered access to the garden for a change of scenery. Once the cavernous sitting room floor space had dried, the massive rebuilding job began with treated joists to support new flooring. The owners chose a wooden parquet style tiling and their builder maestro was so brilliant, he was able to install it with such precision – their choice of finish was so important and having looked at many designs and really not wishing to spend the amount it took, in the end the finished floor looks so perfect. In fact is it very hard to tell that it is replacement flooring, it has the look of antique parquet flooring. Absolute perfection by default.
