Home renovations never seem to go as we planned. They always start going in the direction we want, but one thing or another seems to invade the path we plan our home improvements to go on. The older the house is the farther we are forced to deviate from the plan, it seems. As always, the plan is the backbone of the project. Without a good plan we have chaos.

We are working on a big tile job this week, and we find ourselves at mid-week with only a few feet of tile laid. It seems that everyday we are coming up against one thing or another that needs to be tended to before we continue. We are heating the sub-floor under the tile in both the bathroom and the kitchen. That requires wiring, and to supply the power we need to run the wire, obviously.

Every house is different and access to electric power for under-floor heating will be different. The electrician is the guy that guides us through this part of the project. We simply tell him what we have planned and he tells us what he needs from us. So if you want electric sub-floor heat in these two rooms then we need to run wires down the hallway.

To do that we had to cut a small narrow piece of plywood out of the floor for about twenty feet down the hall to provide access for the electrician to run the wire. The wire was coming up from the panel in the basement and it was to travel to the bathroom then on to the kitchen through this path we created by accessing the floor joists. When we opened the floor we noticed that some of the floor joists were not installed correctly from the original construction of the house.

I am not sure of the age of the house but it was clear that the floor joists were not aligned just right and the gaps were too great to just leave them as they were after the wire was installed. Because the floor was covered in plywood the floor joists were held together in this fashion and the joists were not able to move entirely out of alignment. So repairs were called for before we could replace the piece of plywood we cut out.

Needless to say the house is already built and we can’t take up the floor sheeting entirely to make our repairs. So we had to work with what we had. It was decided to cut a larger section of plywood out of the floor and add some lumber to the floor joists to tie them together. The stability of the floor was our final goal. If the floor moves at all then the tile could come loose or at a minimum the grout would crack.

Repairs took some time, but it was just another un-planned obstacle that had to be tended to before we could carry on with installing the sub-floor plywood then the tile floor. Tiles do need a substantial base that will not move at all because the tiles will just not stay put. If the sub floor moves at all then the tile floor will eventually come apart and the tiles will become loose where they sit.

What a nightmare to have all or even just some of the tiles in the hallway coming loose a few weeks after they were installed. This is the kind of thing that makes a renovator loose sleep. A seemingly easy straight forward job going south just because someone years ago didn’t install the floor joists correctly. This problem would have never surfaced if the homeowner had left the carpet throughout the upper floor.

Even if the renovation called for hardwood it would be possible that the joints or seams in the hard wood would have become wider as the floor undulated and moved. New building practices and codes prevent this from ever happening these days. A building inspector would have spotted this during a regular inspection and had it corrected before the plywood sub-floor was ever installed.

The stability of the house as a whole has its roots in the framing of the walls and the floor. If they are solid then house will be ready for any flooring you choose. Rarely do we ever find out how well constructed our homes are because once the plywood and drywall is installed we just assume that all is fine.

When we do discover these irregularities we must do all we can to make them right or at least as good as we can. Unplanned though they are we just have to prepare for the unexpected and plan for the worst just so we don’t get stabbed in the wallet more than a couple of times during our home renovations and up-grades.

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