It's not just the tiled floors in the kitchen and utility which need overhauling, the suspended timbers on the ground floor all look the worse for rot too. That some of the floorboards are rotten is a bad sign: if the damp's penetrated that high it suggests that the joists are beyond saving for sure. The inspection hole cunningly pre-made by the woodworm showed at least a quarter of the school hall's floor would need replacing, the extent of the damage would need full investigation though.
The intention was to keep as many of the original boards as possible, even if they were likely to be 70s replacements. If nothing else, there's a certain patina which you just can't get from something new but also we wanted to preserve as much of the history as we could.
A first exploratory foray into the far corner wasn't promising. With a few lengths lifted around the hole from wall to hearth there was no real abatement in the rot. Moreover the joists too were in a poor condition. A small hole onto the world below ground a whole picture does not make though. How far do the joists extend? What are they supported on? Why aren't they perpendicular to the wall?
What they had revealed was a somewhat awkward construction. Whereas nowadays floorboards come with 'square' ends (like a scaffolding board) or tongue and groove, they had omitted the 'tongue' and opted for double grooves. The tongue instead was a strip of galvanised steel, most likely 1" x 1/8". This causes a problem for dismantling. With wood only boards you can slip a fine blade, whether that be circular saw, jigsaw or a board saw, between two adjacent planks and split the tongue off one side. This allows you to lever to boards apart so that you can make an opening in the middle of the floor for inspection or maintenance. No such luck with a strip of steel though. To compound the issue, the myriad of terms thrown into our most popular search engine could not find an example of this form of construction anywhere. Therein lies a problem: if we wish to replace just some of the boards, where are the new ones going to come from?
Perhaps an even bigger problem was the condition of the nails holding the boards down. Thoroughly rusted and blown, they would not be removed without a fight, to the extent that try as you might, it was nearly impossible to remove a length of wood without unavoidable damage. And mostly because they crumbled at the first touch.
All this culminated in the decision to do away with it.
What that did mean was we could finally find out where the mains water feed was in the house and what it was made of. From outside, the mains is about half way along the wall of the Hall. Why is a solid question with no answer. Why it is not near the kitchen is also a very valid question. Nonetheless, there it lies. Once inside, it simply emerged from the side wall of the Hall into the adjoining corridor, to be routed on the surface of the wall in all its painted steel glory over the doorway into the dining room, straight through the wall and through to the utility via the Glory Hole. The journey is circuitous and perhaps a little unsightly.
Either way, we felt it would be helpful the know the full story so a bit of jigging and poking later and we had a second hole in the Hall floor, this time by the door. Hey-presto, a mains water feed! Nothing special, just some old steel pipe which shoots up from a darkened hole in the ground just within the wall's perimeter and juts sideways to rise up through some boxing in the corner which hitherto we only thought contained wires.
Still, at least we knew we'd be buying some new floorboards.