Can You Repair Soft Subfloor In An Rv?

How to Repair Soft Floors in an RV Travel Trailer

by John Cagney Nash

rv image by Greg Pickens from Fotolia.com

Because RV travel trailers are often kept in areas of loftier humidity, and often used where there is a lot of atmospheric salinity, they are decumbent to moisture and salt damage. The interiors are especially vulnerable to the wet, and just a single soaking can cause disintegration of the particle board used to build floors. Information technology is this far more than than rotting that can crusade floors to feel soft underfoot. If ponding has occurred fifty-fifty in one case, from a plumbing leak or from rain getting inside, it is likely that a complete replacement of the flooring in that area will be necessary. Prompt repair is vital in keeping your camper serviceable.

Step 1

Move around the whole interior of your RV travel trailer, testing the floors everywhere for a soft feeling and noting the locations on a roughed-out floor plan. Be especially vigilant around slide-outs, places where plumbing is above the floor such as in kitchens and bathrooms, and all around your freshwater storage tank if it is inside.

Step 2

Lift abroad your floor coverings above the soft areas. Sometimes you can go a broad pry bar nether a corner of carpet, equally long as it is thoroughly dried out, and curlicue information technology backward while moving the pry bar astern and frontwards to suspension the glue. The glue will probably take been softened past the water. Floor tiles and linoleum are unremarkably impossible to lift out in reusable pieces.

Step 3

Use your permanent marking pen to make a wavy line that follows the outside of the surface area of floor that feels soft, which is often also swollen. Use your stud locator to find the nearest underfloor support in all four directions, then brand four lines that marker out a square box around the wavy line. Draw another prepare of four lines 1 inch outside the beginning box; this second box is your cutting line.

Step four

Check thoroughly for screws, nails and whatever other metallic in the wood along the cutting line. If you detect any they must be removed, because they can go unsafe flying projectiles if you catch them with your cut tool. They will also blunt your bract.

Step 5

Drill a hole into the flooring where in that location are no underfloor supports, and measure the thickness of the particle board. Adjust the blade peak of your cutting tool to that measurement. Y'all exercise this by adjusting the blade shroud if you are using a circular saw, by adjusting the head depth if you are using a jigsaw or by adjusting the blade guard if you are using a reciprocating saw.

Step 6

Follow your cutting lines exactly. The replacement panel will make a much neater fit if all the cut lines are straight and all the corners are perfect right angles. Lift out the square of soft flooring and you will run across that a 1-inch lip of underfloor support has been created around the hole. Use your tape measure to learn the precise thickness of the sound floor around the edges and make sure you buy replacement material that is exactly the same.

Step vii

Utilise marine-grade plywood for the replacement panel to foreclose whatsoever futurity water that may get in from doing the same corporeality of damage once more. Measure out your hole, transfer the measurements to the ply and cutting it over again making dead straight lines and perfectly foursquare corners. Earlier y'all put it in, check the underfloor insulation and replace it with a comparable insulator if the moisture has made it discolored or deflated.

Step 8

Drop your new panel into identify. It should fit without any horizontal move in whatsoever direction and seat firmly on the 1-inch lips of the four exposed underfloor supports. Drill a countersunk pilot pigsty every 6 inches and secure the ply panel in place using treated exterior decking screws. Lay new floor covering according the manufacturer's instructions.

Install a rug threshold bar over the join between your new floor covering and the RV travel trailer'southward original flooring coverings. This volition disguise the piece of work in an attractive style.

References

Things You'll Need

Warnings

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