Hi all I have been reading and scanning the forums for help on our old van and mostly come up trumps. We are setting about to glue our delaminated floor when we discovered the threshold at the door is damp and rotten. We intend to replace the floor in front of the door and to strip out the door clean it up and reseal it.
You have all made this seem quite straight forward, however I cannot see anywhere mention about the thickness of ply used for the floor. Can any one tell me please?
Also, we intend to do the floor first and then move on to the damaged walls another time as we do not have time to do it all at once. Is it possible to dig out the rot in the walls patch it and fill it without replacing the whole wall panel?
if it was mine,i would fix two beams of 3x3 wood across the underside of the floor before i started fixed at both ends by a bolt.this will support your new floor. if your floor is of the modern construction ie 5 mm ply top and bottom with foam in the centre then the floor is about 2 inch thick.if its really old type then its half inch ply.i would drill a small hole all the way through the floor in a safe place and use a thin stick inserted into it to measure the thickness.
It is only the internal part of the floor that is damp. The underside is bone dry but we will look at doing the support beams as that would make sense for the furture. Shes about 1984.
hi good luck with your wee project ,we had the same problem ,we took the damaged wall back to where it was dry and patched it ,the walls were just taking the water from the floor area supping up the excess !!!!,once we fixed seals etc round the door we repalced part of the floor that was damaged ,and sorted out wall so far so good
why i said supporting beams fitted before you start is i thought you were about to cut out a section of floor,if you are you need something to fix the new section of floor too.
------------- the only silly question is the one you do not ask.
Well we started this weekend. Took off the door and trims, removed the corner cupboard, which meant we had to remove the shower taps. We then stripped out all the rotten wood in the floor, walls and the door frame to the sides and the threshold. The threshold area does run under the kitchen are so we had to crawl in under the oven to rmove all that. Taped it all up and came home. This is a much larger job than we first thought!
Our intention is to treat the wood thats not crumbling away, replace the battons that were beyond repair and wood fill the rest!
My worry is the doorway threshold. There are some really large screws that went from outside into the threshold. We were going to put bits of 3x2 underneath for support but all the pipes run under this area so is impossible without removing all of them. Anybody with any ideas on how this area can be supported or do you think it will be ok?
Thanks for the encouragment all of you. We really do feel out of our depth! I can sew and paint walls - this is something else, We are quite enjoying the challenge though!