25mm gap between skirting board and floor

Newheight13

Hi,

Just had someone to install skirting boards and the fitter said that due to one room being on a slant, there was going to be a gap between floor and skirting. I didn’t release it would be this big! It’s fine on all sides of the room apart from this one wise where the gap is 25mm. When we have carpet fitted there will still be a huge gap despite 20mm of underlay and carpet. 

Any ideas what I can do here? 

Thank you 

tacpot12

The best long-term solution is likely to be to take the skirting board off and get a deeper board made and scribed to the floor. This is really what the orignal contractor should have done, but perhaps they didn't realise the gap would be quite as bad as it is.

It's going to be very difficult to fill the gap with anything. If I was trying to do so, I would cut some long wedges of wood from the skirting material and try to push two wedges together under the skirting board, then cut the excess of each end, and refit them with glue between the wedge faces and the top of the skirting. Some light taps on the ends with a hammer, and using some scrap material across their faces, should get them set so that when the glue dries you have a strong and near invisible repair.    

Newheight13

That’s a great idea, thanks! 

pmartin86

You should probably find out why your floor drops 25mm...Worth looking now and seeing whats going on and making any repairs before you get a nice new carpet down...

Murmansk

If the gap is 25mm and the carpet and underlay are 20mm as you say then the gap will be 5mm which is not that bad is it?

naf123

Get a thicker underlay ?

greyteam1959

Get whoever did that bodge job back to do it properly.
What a mess !!

sevenhills

Large sheet of 9mm plywood?

Chickereeeee

I don't quite understand how it can be OK on all sides apart from one. Does the floor sag in the middle of the wall (gap biggest in the middle)?

travis-powers

Chickereeeee said:

I don't quite understand how it can be OK on all sides apart from one. Does the floor sag in the middle of the wall (gap biggest in the middle)?

The floor slopes, so if the fitter had scribed the skirting to the floor the skirting would not have been wide enough at the high end.
 Fitter should have used wider skirting and scribed it or used material of the same thickness to make up the difference.
 

Bendy_House

Newheight, do you have access to a nice long 'straight edge' you can use on that floor to try and determine what is going on?

You say that 3 sides are fine, so that suggests that this 'dip' doesn't go right across the floor to the opposite side. So, IF this is a funnel-shaped dip starting at, say, the centre of the floor and increasing as it reaches that wall, and IF the floor is otherwise in solid and sound condition, then I'd have thought that this dip could be filled using self-levelling resin of some sort.

A wider pic would help, and if you can get hold of a straight-edge, then use it to build up a picture of the shape and extent of that dip.

Flooring experts - certainly ones who specialise in alternatives to carpet - should be able to suggest ways of levelling that off. Obviously, carpet is more tolerant of some 'dips' (although yours is extreme...), but vinyls and solid floors are not.

I'd be looking at sorting the issue rather than visually compensating for it.

(Small gaps under a long length of skirting can also be tackled by pressing down on the skirting before fixing it - that height skirting will have a reasonable amount of 'flex' in it. Clearly this is Mickey-Mouse practice, but can work as long as the visual line isn't obvious.)