What lies beneath……

The title of this blog is a take on the 2000 supernatural horror movie directed by Robert Zemeckis starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. It’s not a film genre I watch, but it accurately reflects the horrors than can lie beneath a 100 year old building.

Because I wasn’t lifting the building until phase two, I’d tasked my builder with lifting the assortment of floorboards in the vestry so that the plumber could install the pipework and he could install the sub-floor insulation. The intention was to re-lay the floorboards, patch the hole in the nave floor, use the good boards in areas that would be on show, and hide the all-sorts under cabinets and furniture.

Unfortunately the 100+ year old boards turned out to be quite brittle, and there were a few casualties. What also became apparent was that there were more than just a couple of floorboards missing from the nave floor – it had been completely restructured.

As this close-up shows, there were new bearers and floor joists inserted under the nave platform, with the piles under the platform higher than the piles under the rest of the nave and vestry. They’d cut away some of the end wall to insert the bearers, packing them up with bits of floorboard and other random bits of wood.

So between the brittle, fractured floorboards and the big hole in the nave floor, I made the decision to replace the floorboards in the vestry. I’d use the salvaged floorboards to patch the hole in the nave floor when I re-piled the church.

The next challenge was to find a floor that I’d be able to tolerate from a smell and aesthetic perspective. The only suitable wood alternative was bamboo, which you can’t use in wet areas such as bathrooms and laundries……………..

A quick search on TradeMe identified Kersten Building Recyclers & Joinery who were able to run recycled matai floorboards to the specified width and thickness. Order placed, they assured me they’d be able to get them delivered quickly so that they could be laid as soon as the pipe-out was completed. Another unplanned bit of expenditure that’s going to hit my finances!

Other random finds included the 1974 concrete piles next to the original totara piles. The bearers had been attached to the totara piles, but not the concrete ones. We also found the original foundations for the fireplace hearth which the builder would dig out. Strangest of all was a rusty cutter mattock next to a random weatherboard.