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I finally saw the weirdest subfloor repair in a 1920s bungalow in Cincinnati
The homeowner had patched a hole with a piece of an old license plate and about two pounds of roofing tar. It held for maybe six months before the new vinyl plank I was laying over it started to buckle. I had to cut out a 3-foot section and replace it with proper plywood. Has anyone else found something that wild under an old floor?
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kevinking28d ago
Man that's a classic fix right there lol. I gotta say though, vinyl plank buckling after six months is actually pretty fast. Usually those tar and license plate patches hold up for years just from being so stiff and nasty. Makes me wonder if there was a moisture issue from below speeding things up.
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Disagree completely, that fix was doomed from the start. Roofing tar never gets fully hard and stays kinda gummy, so it creeps under pressure. A license plate has zero give and just acts like a hard pivot point right under the planks. Combine a soft glue with a rigid patch and any foot traffic was gonna make that vinyl warp fast. No mystery moisture needed, it was just a bad mechanical setup from day one.
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Forget the glue, the real problem was the temperature swings. Vinyl expands and contracts a lot, but that license plate doesn't move at all. You basically locked a moving floor to a solid anchor point, so something had to give.
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brooket439d ago
Roofing tar actually does get pretty hard over time, it just takes ages to fully cure. That license plate idea is still terrible though. You're right that it's a rigid pivot point, but the bigger issue is how it stops the floor from moving at all. Vinyl needs to float, and locking it down like that creates stress points. The tar might have stayed soft enough to allow some creep, but the plate guarantees a failure.
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