Floor found to be fire fodder

Weather forecast was good for today; not so good for tomorrow, so I was determined to make a start on lifting the garage floor.

Expecting at least some of it to be salvageable, I spent the first hour or so moving our collection of dried logs and tree stumps (which would be ideal for log fires, if we ever lit one in the dining room any more) from the shed to the wood store. Funny how a pile of wood looks fairly small until you try to move it. I adopted my usual mental approach to tasks of this kind: "each piece moved is one piece less to move" and sure enough when I surfaced from that self-imposed mental idle, the job was done and the shed looked considerably more capacious.

Nikki retrieved my crowbar and hammer from the study, and I set to lifting the boards, starting at the door end and working towards the house.

It soon became clear that not a single piece of floor could be rescued. Those two planks that had looked so promising were both too thin to support a man's weight (well, THIS man anyway) and too rotten underneath to be used for anything else. Indeed all the boards, including the ones that looked OK from above, hid a total mess underneath. Whether they'd been chewed up by the hundreds of woodlice living in the sub-floor space, or rotted with the damp, or been turned into dust by woodworm and mould, they were all only good for one thing: burning.

The main reason? None of the floor had been protected from damp. I don't know who built that garage, or when, but they had a pretty strange idea of construction technique. The boards were carried on joists that rested on... earth. Yep, directly on the soil. In many cases these joists had rotted away to nothing - as you can see from the photo. When I tried to pick them up, they would fall apart leaving a trail of dust in the soil. Or they'd split in half, leaving the rotten half behind and me holding the chewed-up top half of damp, spongy timber.

These central joists had transferred their moisture to the floorboards, which were also in various stages of rot. Only at the edges, where the joists rested on a couple of courses of brick, made level with small pieces of slate, had the wood remained dry, but this had only stopped the rot - not the ravages of worm, beetle, and louse.

The patched section, as predicted, had suffered years of oil damage and had in fact given way, the boards beneath split and crumbled. Putting a positive spin on all this - at least the job went quickly. Only the first five or six boards had been nailed down, the rest simply laid loosely on their joists. With the boards neatly stacked against the wall, and having uncovered a couple of 2x2 flagstones, we're all set to have a cracking good fire so we'll be off to the garden centre tomorrow to buy an incinerator. Those oil-soaked boards should burn a treat!