Subfloor Repair

Every once in a while I encounter a bathroom with carpet...

BAD IDEA!

I think this is about the third or fourth time I've run into a bathroom with carpet as the installed flooring. It was NOT a very good situation. Carpet is not the ideal bathroom flooring option for obvious reasons like the difficulty of cleaning it, but there is also a less obvious reason: toilets need to be installed on a solid surface or else the wax ring that seals the toilet to the sewer pipe is likely to start leaking underneath the toilet. When toilets leak over a long period of time, the subfloor begins to swell and soften and rot.

In this case the subfloor was bad enough that it sank in about half an inch at one point causing the toilet to tip and lean against the wall behind it. This eventually caused the seal between the tank and the lower part of the toilet to fail which caused even more leaking. That's when they called me. Don't wait until your bathroom gets that bad. If you have carpet installed underneath a toilet, I highly recommend new flooring ASAP.