This weekend’s project was tearing the rotten wood flooring out of our saloon. Fun, right? Turns out water has been leaking from somewhere in the fridge / air conditioner area and has created quite the water pool underneath the floor. What we thought was two small areas of rot, turned out to be a 6×8 section, which is over half the floor. How this was missed in the survey is beyond us. The more we had to cut out, the more pissed off we got. What kind of competent surveyor misses a rotten floor? What an idiot. Actually, I guess we’re the idiots since we bought a boat at asking price with a rotten floor. You live and learn, eh?

We first noticed the floor was a bit soft after we sailed her back from NC. The longer we had her and more we took her out, certain sections kept getting softer. We figured we could cut out the rotten sections and replace it with new flooring. No big deal. So Matt did some exploratory cuts to see what we were dealing with.

What we found was worse than we expected. It looked like a small lake in between the wood and the fiberglass. Not good.
So we kept cutting. And cutting. And cutting. Until we had cut a 6×8 chunk of floor out. MUCH larger than what we had thought. See all of that dark brown? That’s all the rotten wood. It just disintegrated when you touched it. We were getting rid of a decade’s worth of ick.
We haven’t quite determined the source of the leak, but we’re pretty sure it’s coming from the air conditioner condensate pan. We think the drain hose is clogged or kinked and the pan is overflowing into the floor. There is some staining on the fiberglass inside the locker where the AC is housed that leads us to believe that it overflows from time to time. Hoping we’ll catch it in action this week so we can confirm or deny the source.
We priced replacement flooring and got some serious sticker shock when we leaned that each 4×8 section is several hundred dollars a piece. And we’ll need two pieces to cover the area we removed. There goes another thousand. Oye vey. We need to figure out how to get a donate button added to the site! Until we’re able to identify the source of the leak, we just figured we’d throw down a rug and call it a day. It feels good knowing that the rot is gone though, and we’re really liking how clean and open the area looks without the teal cushions and the huge table. I think a reupholstering project will be coming sooner rather than later. Just churnin’ lemons into lemonade over here!
Any suggestions on how to repair the floor? Any one use any different materials – like cork or bamboo – that looked neat? We figured with half the floor already gone, if we wanted to switch it up, now would be our chance…