Unexpected Challenges

When we pulled up the old floor coverings, we didn’t find a standard, flat subfloor. Instead, we were looking at decades-old, narrow wood floorboards riddled with gaps and uneven edges.

Normally, the go-to fix for an uneven subfloor is to fasten down a fresh 1/4-inch plywood underlayment to create a perfectly flat deck. But in this historic cabin, adding that extra 1/4 inch of height meant the main door wouldn’t clear the new floor. Modifying a door in a 70-year-old cabin is a major headache; it requires a finish carpenter to trim and re-hang the door, a luxury that simply didn’t fit into the client’s strict timeline or budget.

To bridge the gaps without raising the floor height, our crew manually prepped the raw floorboards. We applied an initial layer of Ardex Feather Finish to fill the deep spaces between the individual boards, followed by a meticulous second skim coat to smooth out the entire surface. Because the cabin undergoes intense seasonal temperature swings, we laid the new sheet vinyl using a specialized, cold-resistant adhesive to prevent buckling during freezing North Dakota winters.