You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
Hello,
I wonder if you clever people might have some good ideas...
We have knocked through to make three rooms (breakfast room, pantry/larder thingy and dining room) into a single room kitchen/diner. Those three rooms had three different floors. The dining room has carpet over (what turns out to be) really nice old wood (suspended floor). The pantry bit has a solid floor (tiles on top of hard stuff that goes down to the ground). The kitchen bit has a suspended timber floor too, but they're just tatty old floorboards. The two walls that we've taken out were brick (one load-bearing).
So... our original plan was to just overboard the whole lot and fit something like Karndean throughout (probably wood effect). But now that we've found nice old wood in the dining area, we can't really cover it up with plastic fake wood...
So now we're planning to sand and polish the wood in the dining area, but have something else in the kitchen / breakfast bar bit. The tricky thing is the levels... if we overboarded the kitchen bit and the breakfast bar (currently quarry tiles) and tiled on top then we'd be added quite a bit of height, and the transition between the two levels would be just a few inches behind the natural place where the back legs of stools-at-the-breakfast-bar would sit, so a bit of a recipe for falling over backwards!
Here's the rough (future) layout (worktops not shown):
https://photos.app.goo.gl/1yQT6go54BqtVA1R9
Here's a photo of the current situation (taken from the dining zone):
https://photos.app.goo.gl/rBUrfvk988f7y4wW6
We can probably dig out the quarry tiles, and remove the existing floorboards from the kitchen zone and replace with e.g. ply, so that we just tile on top of there, but there'd still be I guess at least 15 - 20 mm height difference(?).
Another option might be to do as above, but then fit Karndean type stuff (I assume that we'd still need to dig out the quarry tiles, remove the floorboards from the kitchen bit and ply that whole area first?)
Any other ideas? Anything that I'm missing? Anyone know somebody in the Oxford area who is an expert in this kind of thing?
Thanks if you've read this far...
I can understand your reticence to lose the nice floorboards, but we laid solid wood flooring at our old house throughout a similar open-plan space. In our current house we put Karndean down (again in a similar space to what you describe) and I so much more prefer it. Yes it doesn't have the beauty of real wood, but it still looks as good as new, even right by the front door (as it runs straight through into the hallway) some four years on since we did it.
Could build a handrail/fence to stop the backwards movement of stools - but there may be not enough room , it would still look like an open space though , or have a high fixed bench built
for the breakfast bar - can have shelving on back to make it useful.
It's quite possible to have a nice oak ramp made that would transition between the dining room and the kitchen floors but TBH if you expose the dining room floor you may well start getting problems with draughts coming up through the floor.
I'd just overboard the lot with ply and fit your finish of choice.
I’d just overboard the lot with ply
Yes this is VERY important if you are laying Karndean - don't scrimp on the boarding out, pin at 15cm centres and ensure all pins are properly flush.
Edit: In fact Karndean don't recommend ply at all...
Wooden subfloors – Karndean do not endorse/approve any plywood product and so take no responsibility for the performance of any plywood selected. However, we recommend the use of a minimum 6 mm flooring grade plywood meeting the requirements of the CFA Guidance Note:-Plywood for Overlaying Suspended Floors, (soon to be included as Annex C in BS 8203) as acceptable for use with Karndean products. It is incumbent upon the installer to verify this compliance through either independent certification or other means. It’s important to remember that plywood joints should be smoothed over using skim coat or a full coat of fibre reinforced smoothing compound.
Thanks very much guys.
That last bit about Karndean is slightly confusing though - they don't endorse/approve any plywood product but yet they recommend a type of ply as being suitable... Huh? We'd be getting a 'proper' installer to do it anyway, so hopefully they would know how to do it properly.
I was going to recommend Trouty. Then I remembered 🙁
they don’t endorse/approve any plywood product but yet they recommend a type of ply as being suitable
I take that to mean they don't approve of it but accept there will be occasions where it needs to be used so give some guidance on the least you should specify. We just laid the ply and pinned it as I said above and it has lasted well (there's just one small patch where the floorboard below squeaks slightly).
I’ve just had similar and levelled the lot and fitted LVT. You can use ply, feather finish the joints and stick down LVT. I work for a flooring manufacturer so you can definitely stick onto ply.
Overply the floorboards to bring them level-ish with the kitchen floor. Then get someone who knows what he or she is doing to latex the whole thing to give one continuous surface. Just make sure it’s a flexible latex as you’re going over a suspended floor. At that point you can apply your sticky backed plastic floor and wonder at how it looks just like wood and is so easy to keep clean. 😀