I am at it again… As the escrow closing date on my house approaches, I am scurrying to finish up some projects that would be very difficult if we were living in or even traveling in the coach. Chief amongst them is doing the Bamboo floor from the bathroom forward to just behind the pilot and copilot’s chairs. As most everybody well knows, this involves the demolition of the hardwood floor in the galley area. Now, though I had heard that this is a difficult process in other threads, I really did not believe that I would have that much trouble with it. That was before I started this project. Now it isn’t so much the demolition itself (though that was a physically arduous task, to say the least!), I accomplished that in less than a day. No, the more difficult part is remediating the damage done to the subfloor while demolishing the hardwood floor. It wasn’t just glued to the plywood subfloor, it was glued to aluminum sheet metal that was in turn glued to the plywood subfloor with some staples thrown in! I have never seen anything like that and still not sure what the reason for it might have been. One thing is clear, they never meant that floor to be easily removed!
The remediation process involved first removing all the loose splinters, and then cutting pieces of fiberglass cloth to fit some of the larger areas where one or two plies of wood were missing. Then mixed epoxy with some filler and flooded those areas with several coats. Then I sanded all the high spots and leveled it. Finally, I used fiberglass reinforced Bondo to fill the low spots. Now I am finally ready to start laying out the cork underlayment for the bamboo floor.
