What kind of coating to choose to replace the old wooden floor and how to lay
Good afternoon! Please advise how best to deal with this situation. The house was renovated (everything was updated, but for some reason except the floors in some rooms). The floors are wooden, but not new, this is the first floor of a private house. The boards are already old and creak, in places there are even slight discrepancies. Which floor is better to do now, what to bed? And what is the best way to do this, on the boards or to pluck them?
Diana
Expert Answer
Hello, Diana.
To decide whether to leave old floors in the house or to build new ones, it is necessary to carefully examine the existing wooden coating. Mold, fungus, rot spots and heavy damage by the woodcutter indicate that they need to be updated. If the boards were not exposed to dampness (and this is indirectly indicated by the cracks that appeared between the boards) and did not begin to pour in dust, then they can be used as a base for more modern coatings.
The creaking of the floor most often appears after many years of operation and is explained by the weakening of nail joints due to the drying out of logs and boards. The latter begin to shift under load, causing friction on the logs, nails and between themselves. To eliminate these negative phenomena, it is enough to repeatedly pull the creaking floorboards to the lags, only not with nails, but with self-tapping screws. If the wooden floor is laid on a reinforced concrete floor, then creaking can be eliminated with anchor bolts.
As a topcoat, you can choose any material - laminate, parquet, linoleum or carpet. If the old one does not have differences in height of more than 2 mm per 1 running meter, then the laminate can be laid directly on a wooden base. With large irregularities, as well as under soft materials such as linoleum or carpet, OSB, chipboard or plywood with a thickness of at least 15 mm are laid on the old floor. By the way, it is not difficult to make the new flooring warm if you lay an infrared film or heating mats under it.
Do everything according to our recommendations, and you can forget about the annoying creak forever. Practice shows that unpleasant sounds disappear even without hauling boards, after laying a parquet board or laminate. This is facilitated by the presence of a soft substrate and a decrease in the specific load on the surface of the base.
If the old wooden floor is damaged and worn so much that its further operation is in doubt, then boards and logs should be dismantled. After that, they evaluate the integrity of the concrete base, carry out spot repairs or make a new screed. By the way, the latter case is also an excellent reason to make an electric or water floor heating. There are a lot of useful information on how to do this on our website.
