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Old 07-19-2017, 03:46 PM   #1
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Palmyra , Pennsylvania
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Floor Underlay Replacement

Has anyone replaced all or part of their motorhome wood floor underlay?
What was your experience getting it done? What was the total parts & labor cost, (including removal / re-build or installation of cabinetry, appliances, systems, etc.)?
Where did you have it done? How long was your motor home in the shop for the repair or restoration?

I'm considering paying someone else to replace the floor underlay in a 2005 Interstate Twin Rear Lounge / Mid-bath. Except for the flooring issue, the rest of the motorhome is in good condition, with 60K on the T1N Sprinter / almost new Michelin tread; less than 30 hrs. on the Gen-set; and all appliances work well.

Not sure what percentage of the floor is rotten. My estimate is: 90% of the driver's side; 50% of the central aisle; and 65% of the passenger side. I've already removed most of the back half of the driver's side underlay and temporarily replaced it with closed cell foam insulation. Did not see any sign of the steel floor chassis rusting or corrosion. The floor underlay I removed looked like a mix of potting soil with varying degrees of wood board fiber and solid wood. I've not found any significant places where the moisture is still getting inside. It looks like there were roof leaks around the Fantastic Fan long enough to cause some rust around the surrounding ribs. Also, the OEM fresh water pump was replaced (maybe because the OEM was leaking?), which might help explain where at least some of the floor moisture came from.

This is our first RV, which we've only owned since April 2017. It cost around $42K. We're trying to decide whether to keep it or resell it. It's also our 2nd car for everyday (i.e. non-RV) use. Fortunately, no significant signs of mold or mold odor. Kind of wondering if I could dry out the floor underlay enough, could that be a cheaper way out of complete floor restoration?

Any and all advice or suggestions going forward would be welcome. We live near Harrisburg, PA (Central PA). There are no serious RV service / restoration places near us (less than 2-3 hour drive). I'm wondering if a home kitchen
re-modeler might consider doing all or most of the work, since there seem to be many of them around here.
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Old 07-20-2017, 06:13 AM   #2
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You’re the OP who recently had the issue with the couch(es) coming loose from the floor because of the same degradation issue. I wondered what became of that.

I’m almost 3 years on Air Forums, plus I run The Interstate Blog so I get an interesting assortment of T1N Interstate owners contacting me off-forum as they do their research on various issues. I have never even remotely heard of any problem like this in another T1N Interstate. To my memory, nobody has even reported *partial* sub-floor issues. Thus far, your situation appears unprecedented.

In several more weeks, I’ll be driving through Harrisburg on IH-81, heading to Nova Scotia. Depending on where you are located and how my schedule is unfolding (I’m attempting to rendezvous with other family who is also traveling more than a thousand miles... you know how that kind of plan can get fouled up), I might like to take a brief look at your rig. With the percentages of damage that you’re talking about, it’s not clear to me that a water pump and/or a Fantastic could have been responsible. Understanding what happened is relevant to the eventual remedy selected.
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Old 07-20-2017, 12:03 PM   #3
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Interstate Floor Rot

InterBlog: I re-attached the the Twin bed frames by using sheet metal screws one size up (larger O.D.) from the OEMs. Then I silicon III caulked both the interior and exterior ends of the screws. So far, so good. I that repair process I also noticed the OEM assembly/install was botched. The screw locations holding the bed frame to the driver side wall were placed about an inch too high. This stressed the frame out of square, which probably contributed to the other loose screw and stability issues of the bed frame. I corrected the oem error when I re-attached the frame.

Do I understand you correctly in that you've never heard of anyone having rot issues with Airstream OEM installed subfloor / flooring? That sounds like no one has ever had moisture accumulation through their floor go undetected or fixed? Like no one has ever had water leaks in their RV? Seems like gravity would channel pretty much any leakage eventually to the floor. Or are you referring to leakage all the way through both the floor and chassis? After a bit more thorough inspection of the fasteners (i.e. sheet metal screws, bolts, and rivets) securing interior assemblies to the Sprinter chassis, it looks pretty clean (i.e. no rust or corrosion) underneath the chassis. Of course those sorts of issues could be masked by all the OEM undercoating.
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Old 07-20-2017, 01:19 PM   #4
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I did get your PM and some of these logistics we'll talk about directly.

What concerns me is that your rig sounds fundamentally inconsistent. There are plenty of people with rotted floors in motorhomes and travel trailers. Not so many people with rotted floors where the rest of the rig sounds like it was lightly used and well cared for, as yours does. There's a reason why the well-known phrase is "rode hard and put away wet". When things aren't rode hard, they're typically put away dry. People who let their water pumps drip or who allow leak issues to accumulate normally show disregard and abuse across the board, which doesn't seem to fit your rig's profile.

For that reason, I wouldn't jump to any conclusions as to cause, in the absence of incontrovertible evidence. If there's one thing that my husband and I have learned through the last several years of this burgeoning hobby, it's that Interstates are full of surprises. Some of them derive from unexpected origins.
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Old 07-21-2017, 10:07 AM   #5
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Rode Hard put away wet

Quote:
Originally Posted by InterBlog View Post
I did get your PM and some of these logistics we'll talk about directly.

What concerns me is that your rig sounds fundamentally inconsistent. There are plenty of people with rotted floors in motorhomes and travel trailers. Not so many people with rotted floors where the rest of the rig sounds like it was lightly used and well cared for, as yours does. There's a reason why the well-known phrase is "rode hard and put away wet". When things aren't rode hard, they're typically put away dry. People who let their water pumps drip or who allow leak issues to accumulate normally show disregard and abuse across the board, which doesn't seem to fit your rig's profile.

For that reason, I wouldn't jump to any conclusions as to cause, in the absence of incontrovertible evidence. If there's one thing that my husband and I have learned through the last several years of this burgeoning hobby, it's that Interstates are full of surprises. Some of them derive from unexpected origins.
Just for 'fun' here's another speculation: Maybe one or both of the previous 2 owners mostly kept the RV in a dry barn. Maybe one of those storage periods was 6 months or a year or whatever. Long enough for a slow not right away obvious leak to move around the floor and begin rot.
Airstream service told me for the rot I described, it probably took at least a year to develop. Interestingly, they corroborate what you said about my RV floor issues being unprecedented. They said they can't remember ever replacing an Interstate floor 100%. I asked them about maybe openning suspect (i.e. soft) flooring areas and taking measures to try to dry out as much as possible. That might be a lot cheaper than ripping out cabinets / appliances then putting them back in. A big question to me is how much longer the painted steel chassis bed will remain intact with the rotted floor 'potting soil' sitting on top of it? Of course I can see a potential cascade of other issues developing if the floor is left as is, like more mounting screws loosen up and cause cabinets / appliance framing to start racking. Once that happens, seems like just a matter of time before those interior items start falling apart or become unusable.
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Old 07-21-2017, 02:54 PM   #6
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Another possibility - and this is pure, unsupported speculation - is that it was a flooded vehicle that was not properly remediated or disclosed as such.

We've heard rumors of big, big problems with this kind of thing happening in our area (Houston) where commercial vehicle lots (including RV lots) flood like clockwork, unscrupulous persons get hold of the insurance write-offs, conceal the issues, and then pass them off as fit vehicles. Often times it's not possible to tell by looking at interior surfaces and cabinetry alone, if they catch them quickly enough and do a good job of drying out the interiors. But once the subfloor is submerged one time, there's no way to recover it. It's "opened up" at that point and it continues a track of accelerated deterioration.

I have a friend who probably ended up with a travel trailer that went through this process, given the forensics (omitting details for brevity). Of course it wasn't visible when she bought it. Only later.

Anyway, it could be one thing or the other thing. But even if your rig was put up in storage for an extended period, no owner in their right mind would have left any water in it at all. Tanks and lines would have been drained. It would almost certainly have been winterized.
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Old 11-12-2018, 09:58 AM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jonathanwesc View Post
[FONT=Arial]...

I'm considering paying someone else to replace the floor underlay in a 2005 Interstate Twin Rear Lounge / Mid-bath. ...

Not sure what percentage of the floor is rotten. My estimate is: 90% of the driver's side; 50% of the central aisle; and 65% of the passenger side. .... The floor underlay I removed looked like a mix of potting soil with varying degrees of wood board fiber and solid wood. I've not found any significant places where the moisture is still getting inside. .....
Bold emphasis mine above. Partial cross-post of an update here.

I lost track of this OP, but I never forgot the issue itself. My husband and I may have inadvertently just solved part of the riddle of where and how significant water can penetrate into a T1N's plywood subfloor.

As explained on another thread (here), I pulled up the table leg receivers in the rear of our Interstate. We recently installed a Lagun table with two sets of mounting hardware, front and back of the van (here), and so we no longer need those OEM receiver cups that Airstream inserted into the floor, and which extend all the way through the chassis.

Furthermore, I wanted to add carpet tiles, and the original receivers stick up too far above the plane of the floor to do this. So out they came, and I've sealed the holes temporarily with two thin, flat sheet metal caps that I fabricated yesterday, as shown in the photo below (LB_3 finds these to be inelegant, but they are temporary, and carpet tiles will go over the top of them even in the short term, so they won't be visible).

It wasn't until we situated these replacement caps that we could see the degree to which the plywood subfloor is swollen in the vicinity of these penetrations. Airstream did not properly seal the holes that they cut in this location, which allowed water penetration from below. Our situation is not nearly as severe as that described by the OP, but I'm glad that I located it when I did, because now I can seal off the area and prevent the condition from worsening.

Now that I know more about a likely water penetration pathway, I can formulate an hypothesis as to why the OP's rot condition was so severe (as reported by him).

I speculate that the described pattern of damage was caused by termites which accessed the subfloor through the table leg penetrations. All that would be needed for that to happen is for them to build a mud tube up to the chassis penetration. Anyone who has ever had termites in their house knows how incredibly adaptive they can be - they can "smell" and locate damp wood across long distances. They build their own transportation tubes many feet into the air in order to access desirable wood.

Originally I was accepting the hypothesis that the OP's subfloor got wet because of water penetration via the ROOF (Fantastic and/or other penetrations). If that were solely the case, there'd still be no means of access for termites. But wetting from the ground up? That's another scenario entirely.

How could termites (and/or other wood-destroying insects such as carpenter ants) establish themselves in a motor vehicle, you might wonder? Even if they get in, the thing is on the move, so how would they get established and remain viable?

= Very easy for them if the rig is left parked in one spot for months at a time, which many owners tend to do.

This is just my speculation, but there it is. The OP's description of extensive but patchy rot and "coffee grounds" is very consistent with wood-destroying insects.

Meanwhile, I've got a floor to patch and seal, PROPERLY this time (as I stick yet another needle in my Airstream voodoo doll).

Here's one of my thin, flat metal caps. We might get SNOW in Houston in the next 24 hours, so I had to fabricate and install these lickety-split so that rodents would not make these two holes into their personal Stairway to Heaven. The next cold front is going to have rodents activating their predictable migration into cozier areas of all kinds. That happens to us in the south. Rodents tend to remain outdoors until the weather becomes inhospitable. Then they make a major run for it.


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Old 11-13-2018, 07:45 PM   #8
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INTERBLOG - I saw a few more posts from OP after your discussion with him/her. Some unresolved window leak and consistent year round storage outdoors, sitting on gravel the entire time, exposed to elements (snow buildup, winter, and who knows whether proper winterizing). From the first post, that rig sounded like a can of worms I would not want to tackle. I feel for OP. Might have been a super deal but clearly a headache at that. Adding to that is he/she is new to all this stuff, which carries it's own non-intentional neglect issues.

I don't think rodents or burglars can penetrate that previoysly improperly sealed penetration by AS Good job.
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Old 11-14-2018, 04:53 AM   #9
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Our schedules did not mesh last summer, so I never did see the rig. I don't know which direction the OP took regarding it.
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