Wooden floor over wooden floor?

[Madangan]

Hi all,

Looking for advice re flooring on upstairs bedroom. There is an existing wooden floor(house circa 1912) but I dont think it was ever intended to be exposed i.e carpet probably always envisaged. I am trying to decide between carpet again or a wooden floor. The existing floor has pretty big gaps and I doubt if even after heavy sanding and varnishing it would look all that great. So is it possible to lay a solid wood floor on top of existing floor and if so what would I need to do? Obviously it would be necessary to nail down any old boards etc.. but what type of sound proofing would be necessary etc... It may not be an option to take up the old floor hence the question in the first place.

All opinions advice welcome

 

[mathepac]

Hmm, interesting. The old floor may be something like hand-sawn or rough-sawn pitch pine.

If you are determined to put a new wooden down, then maybe options 1 and 2 are not for you, so skip ahead to 3 and 4!

1) lift existing floor after removing skirting boards, install silicone membrane / sound-proofing on top of existing floor joists to reduce noise. Install new wooden floor over this. This approach means you won't have to cut the bottoms off doors as the floor will be pretty much at its current level as long as you pick boards that are close to the thickness of the old ones. Re-install skirting.

2) As above but have old floor boards machined planed and sanded for regularity along their edges and faces and reinstall them. You may have to buy a board or two to make up for the length / width you lose off the old boards. An architectural salvage yard may be able to help you here. As the boards will be sanded off site, they should only require a minimum of clean up work once they are back in situ and can be treated / varnished / stained once reinstalled. Re-install skirting.

3) Remove skirting and lay breathable sound-proofing membrane over existing floor. Lay sheets of light plywood over membrane and check for level. Lay "anti-squeak" sheeting over ply and install new floor over this. Re-install skirting.

4) As above but leave skirting in place and pin scotia to skirting once new floor is installed, personally I hate this.

Options 3 and 4 may entail trimming the ends of doors and / or removing or changing existing door saddles.

For options 1,2 and 3 you might want to consider redecorating the skirting while its off as I find this much easier then when its in place.

This all sounds simple “on paper”, but you will need to find a firm with a good track record to undertake the work, once you decide what you want.

These are only 4 of a number of options and some of the professionals on here will no doubt have better ideas than mine, and spot pitfalls that I haven’t. There are arguments for and against fixed versus floating floors and a variety of techniques that can be used.

A word of warning: when refurbishing older houses, no-one knows for sure what they will find when tearing down or refurbishing, so allocate a bit of contingency in the budget you set yourself and ensure that when the work is being done only nail-guns or screw-drivers are used as hammering on the old or new floors may damage the 100-year old ceiling downstairs.

BTW, my choice would be option 1, but that’s only because the house is younger than me.

Best of luck with it.