Email #35 - Poor Floor

Poor floor. I feel sorry for the floor. It's not like it's a poor quality floor. I'm sure it will be a fine floor, and no one will fall through it. But it's a low income, minimum wage floor. A poor floor. A value-engineered floor.

Here's some recent photos of the floor construction in the SW quadrant of the building. This used to be Rm. 124, the Studio for all incoming 3-year M.Arch students. In the future it will be a warren of offices.

The new floor you see is just plywood screwed into the original 1909 sleeper boards, except where they had to be replaced because of dry rot. Carpet or linoleum will go on top of the plywood, and that's it. Same on the second floor above. Actually, the first floor will get a second layer of plywood later before the linoleum or carpet, but the second floor gets just one layer of plywood like you see here.

In the lower photograph you see the tools of the trade for leveling the plywood. This area was the most infested with rotten sleepers, so these are mostly new sleepers in the photos. They photograph a lot better than the 1909 ones, which blend into the gray grout bed.

At the renovation of the 1906 Cobb Building downtown - also owned by the University of Washington - a similar sleeper board & grout layer was revealed. But it got covered up with a sturdy new layer of self-leveling Gypcrete. And on top of that went a fine hand-set hardwood floor. That was a wealthy floor.

But we got a poor floor. Even so it got more expensive because they didn't expect rotten sleepers, and those have to be replaced.

John Stamets
Oct. 7, 2006

See also #26 and #36

P.S. I'll be presenting some of this Architecture Hall photography to The Colloquium on the Built Environment on Thursday Oct. 12 from Noon- 1 pm in Gould 208J. Most of what I'll be showing will be photos you haven't seen yet.