On Sunday, April 28, 2013 5:18:15 PM UTC-4, wrote:
We had our kitchen floor replaced.
[snip]

A few more details:

The old floor was also a Bruce product. We knew what was underneath in the sense that some air vent/register comes out easily, and you can look from there.

The sales guy said that between having been sanded down or something, and (IIRC) having been thinner to begin with, they'd probably take the stuff underneath the Bruce planking [? I'm not an expert in these things] out. If they didn't, the floor would be higher, and that's not the end of the world except that then e.g. this door at the side of the addition would no longer open (it was a pretty tight fit as it was).

The house is pretty old, a 1948 brick Colonial, and IMHO it's overall a good house, but having been through many owners there's a few quirky things about it. My guess is that the sheeting they did rip out was somehow placed to compensate for the transition, and when they ripped it out that "fix" was removed and not replaced.

My own guess is that as one of you said, "...to do this right would have required some more finesse, time, skill..." It was supposed to be a one-day job, and they did finish in a day. Also, none of the guys on site spoke English at all well, according to my wife who was here. Whether that correlates with being less skill is a potential flamewar that I don't think it's worth getting into, but obviously it might make communication more difficult..

My own attitude is conflicted. On the one hand, I'm not much into aesthetics, and it's not a big deal to me. All I give a $h*t about is resale implications, which I think are probably pretty minor. OTOH, we live in a world of real "information asymmetry," as economists would say, and I get pretty damn tired of people doing jobs quickly and at low cost, and without a degree of professionalism that should be reasonable to expect. Sadly, this kind of crap is hardly limited to the construction trades, but that's a rant for a different newsgroup.