House was built in 1929, plaster walls throughout.
I have been unable to convince my beautiful lady (she may wind up seeing this) to let me try to refinish the existing hardwood floor under the carpet we tore up (living room, first floor, with basement underneath). In addition, a friend whose opinion I trust said I should go ahead and replace the diagonal tongue-in-groove subfloor as well (it creaks like absolute crazy along every inch, even when the 20-lb dog walks around; every step is squeak-squeak-groan-creak). I was hesitant to do this, because I'm all about trying to keep as much original stuff as possible (I'm one of those grizzled old-timers that believes, whether I have proof for it or not, that they just did things better "back in the day"), but I can see his point about possibly needing to level the floor out better, plus, with the amount of creaking we've got, and with the floor visibly bowing under one's feet when we walk around, the number of screws we'd have to re-tighten, shims to put in under the original subfloor, etc., it would just be better to rip it all up and put in plywood subfloor. The joists don't seem to be the problem, but even if they are, I'd rather fix it at its source (adding joist shims before doing the floor) than keep ramming the little shim here and there in 500 places.
AAAAANYWAY, my question is this: these are plaster walls, and the subfloor goes farther underneath the wall than I will be able to get to to remove the subfloor in the room completely. I can use a whipsaw and remove it up to flush with the inside surface of the wall, but there's still going to be little pieces/strips of subfloor under the wall where I can't get to to remove it. Is that bad? Would a lot of you call that a botch job, to remove as much subfloor as we can possibly get to, but leaving that little amount under the actual wall? The guy advising me says there's really nothing else to do; the original builders (or at least, whoever did this room as it is now) did the floor, then they did the walls on top of it, so I can't get access under wall to remove the small amount of subfloor under the plaster wall.
So we're going to put in little spacers in between the joists up to the edge of the wall, just to have surfaces to nail the edge of the subfloor into, but there's still going to be little strips of subfloor under the actual wall.
Again; is this normal, or would it be considered cuttng corners/botching the job/leaving heartache for future work?
Any advice, opinions, etc. would be appreciated, and thanks for reading.