Hi everyone,

I recently bought a house in Brooklyn NY, which was built in 1901. Two floors, plus a basement. On the first floor are the original parquet wood floors. The parquet "tile" at the bottom of the stairs sinks in when you step on it. Seems like maybe the sub-floor underneath is broken. My hope is that I can possibly fix it from underneath, by adding support to the sub-floor from the basement. I figured I'd take a look and worst case scenario call in a floorer.

The basement has a drop ceiling, so I removed a couple of tiles to take a look. I expected to see the exposed joists, sub-floor, etc, but here's what I'm looking at (see the photos). Basically strips of wood covered in some sort of cement-type stuff. To get to the broken section of the sub-floor I'd need to remove a small section of this wood/cement stuff. You can see in two of the photos that some sections are already removed (not by me), but unfortunately not the section that I need.

Anyway I'm not sure what that cement stuff is, but I can pull it away with my fingers for the most part. It occurred to me that maybe this stuff contains asbestos so I'm posting to see if anyone has any insight before I continue any further.

Thanks, much appreciated.

 

The wood is called lathe. The plaster is applied so that it overlaps into the lathe.

That looks to be plaster but with the age I'm guessing could contain asbestos strands.

 

Interesting. The rest of the house does have plaster and lathe, but I didn't expect to find that in the basement, and certainly not under the drop ceiling. What would be the purpose of plastering the ceiling this way, any idea? There are pipes and wires nailed to the plaster in various places, but I'd think they could've just as easily gone right into the lathe, or directly into the joists no?

Darn it, not sure what to do now about the parquet floor situation which started this all off. Not worth the risk to cut away a section?

 

No, it is called lath. A lathe is a machine tool and lath is a support for plaster.

Lathe - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Lath - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

 

But springy sections of lath were once used on lathes to convert vertical foot power to rotary power to turn the lathe. My guess one word derives from the other.

 

Thank you....the correction is very helpful to this thread. Yes.... lath.

The basement originally had a lath and plaster ceiling and probably with age and humidity it started crumbling. Also, they may have opened the basement ceiling to make repairs and it was just easier to install a suspended ceiling over the entire thing.

It would be a good idea to have the plaster analyzed. In the mean time.... use a dust mask while disturbing anything above the drop ceiling. The airborne dust is what you want to avoid breathing.