My latest project is replacing tiles on a floor. This is the fourth time I’ve done this type of project, and each time it seems to be harder, because of certain obstacles that the previous job didn’t present. This floor is in a small hallway at the back of my house, in one corner of which is the water heater. The heater used to leak, apparently because of a problem with the tap used to drain it at the bottom, and since at that time I was renting the house to someone else, I wasn’t aware of it for quite a while. A pool of water built up under the heater, and eventually got through the tiles and started rotting the subfloor below them. This would be a problem anywhere in the house, but particularly here because of the water heater. Full of water, it weighs something like 120-150 kg, so it puts a lot of stress on even a solid floor.
So the first step was to move the water heater out of the way. This is fairly straightforward once you understand where everything is and what it does. You turn off the water and gas coming into it, then drain the water out of the tank, so that it’s light enough to lift or at least move by rocking back and forth. However, there was another problem. The heater has a pressure relief valve, which opens when the water inside the tank becomes overheated, and allows it to flow out of the tank. The valve connects to a pipe that passes through the wall of my house and outside to the back yard, where the water can drain safely. To move the heater, I needed to unscrew the pipe from the heater, but I couldn’t get it to budge with my best efforts with a wrench. So I ended up having to saw through the pipe.
After the heater was moved, I could get at the floor underneath it. Not only was a large area of the subfloor, consisting of ¾” plywood, rotted, but one of the floor boards that the subfloor rests on was also rotted, making the floor even weaker. I had to remove that board and replace it, and at this point another problem emerged. The board, 8 feet long and 9” wide, extends from one wall of a small alcove off the hallway to the other wall. The joists that the floor boards rest on are 2 x 8s that are spaced 16” apart. Unfortunately, the last joist accessible before each wall is 12” or more from the wall, meaning that the board would be unsupported for the last foot or so of its length just before the wall.
At one wall, the next joist was just beyond the edge of the wall, so I was able to extend it by nailing two pieces of 2 x 4s to it. At the other wall, though, the next joist was far past the wall, and inaccessible. This was the wall next to where the water heater rests, so support was critical. To make it worse, there was a pipe in front of the joist inside the wall, so there was no way I could do anything involving that joist.
The only thing I could do was extend the accessible joist towards the wall, by nailing 2 x 4s to it. I managed with great difficulty to nail four of them—as I got closer to the wall it became progressively harder to find enough room to swing the hammer—thus extending that joist by about six inches toward the wall, and leaving just the final six inches of the floor board unsupported. The water heater, in place, would be almost entirely clear of this portion, fortunately. The 2 x 4s were further strengthened by screwing them to the floorboards on either side of the board to be replaced.
With the new floorboard in place, I was able to replace the old subfloor with ¾” plywood, nailing it to the floorboards. But there was still another difficulty. I didn’t want to remove and replace the entire subfloor in the hallway; that would have been a lot of work, and most of it was in good condition, not rotted, and didn’t need replacing. But you can’t easily just rip up some subfloor to a predetermined line, and go no further. As you strip off some, you began to weaken and strip more beyond it, in a very ragged and unpredictable pattern.
Maybe there is a power saw that allows you to make cuts flat on a floor, so you can cut the plywood exactly where you want to, down to the floorboard and no further, but with the hand tools I have—basically, just a hammer, saw, and chisel—trying to do this was incredibly difficult and time-consuming. It took me several hours just to remove subfloor to a line three foot long. In the end, I gave up trying to do it all that way, and used floor patch to fill in the spaces between where the old plywood ended and the new plywood began. This is a gray, pasty substance (except for the color, it looks and feels like sh!t) that takes several hours to dry even with a very thin layer, and because I had some deep areas to fill, I had to make three separate applications.
I’m an old man now, and this is a young man’s job! I spent many, many hours down on my hands and knees, and my body just ached all over from the sheer effort. Getting under old tiles or old subfloor and ripping it off with just a putty knife (tiles) or hammer and chisel (plywood subfloor) requires enormous strength and patience, and it’s made that much harder by having to do it on one’s knees. To put it in perspective, it could take as long as fifteen minutes to pry off one 12" x 12" old tile, depending on how strongly it was bonded to the floor.
After all this, the actual laying of the tiles was fairly quick and easy, the fun part for me. But there was one more unwelcome surprise waiting in store. After I finished tiling the area where the water heater would rest, and moved the heater back into place, I filled it with water—and discovered that it was leaking. Every water heater has a code on it, and after some internet searching to learn how to decode it, I discovered it was more than thirty years old—so probably a good time to replace it, anyway.
It turns out that in California, anyway, it costs as much or more to hire someone to install a water heater as it does just to buy it. I considered trying to install the new one myself, but in the end paid someone to do it. It was just as well, because like everything else in this project, not all went smoothly. After the guy put the new heater in place (slightly cracking one of my brand new tiles, huhuhu) and connected the water, there was a leak in the water inflow. As is usual when replacing water heaters, he had discarded the old connectors for new ones, so that wasn’t the problem. He had to remove a pipe connected to the faucet on the wall, and weld a new one in place, something I wouldn’t have had the tools for. Also, because the new heater was not exactly the same height as the old one, that pressure relief pipe didn’t match up with the hole in my wall it was supposed to pass through. He had to add a couple of 90 degree elbow joints to get it to go, involving more tools I didn’t have. (You can see this work in the first picture below, the copper pipe leading from the top of the water heater to the wall to the left).
But finally, after more than a week, I can take hot showers again. I was fortunate that during the period the water heater was out of commission, we had a heat wave, and taking cold showers was not an issue.