Browse Forums Flooring & Floor Covering 1 Oct 13, 2008 9:32 am One of the most difficult decisions for me, and I guess many others, is what flooring to use in a house.
The options are: 1) Carpet 2) Ceramic tiles 3) Wooden floorboards 4) Laminate flooring (that is, plastic of some sort) 5) Vinyl/lino/etc I'll be using carpet, tiles and wooden floorboards in my house. Of course within each option there are choices to be made. For instance with wooden floorboards, you can have: 1) Solid timber (12 mm or 19 mm) 2) Engineered wood (with about 4 mm of real wood as the top layer) Then you have to decide how to fix it (for a concrete slab): 1) Nailed to battons (only for 19 mm timber) 2) Nailed to plywood 3) Direct stick 4) Floating (then need to select which underlay) And today I've discovered that if you go for a floating floor it can't go under a kitchen island, but has to butt up to it with quads around it. Or can it go under a kitchen island. It's all so daunting. Interested in what people found worked well for them and your thoughts on the different options. Cheers, Casa Demolition August 2009, Construction Started September 2009, Completed December 2010 Re: Flooring options 2Oct 13, 2008 9:56 am We used solid timber spotted gum. It looks good and feels great to walk on. We did them ourselves and had ours laid before the skirtings went on. This meant a bit of negotiating with the builder. The flooring butts up against the island bench with less than a mm gap.
We don't have any 1/4 round in the house and it looks great. In one or two areas you could see a slight gap under the skirting where the foundation was not completely flat. Our flooring guy said that if it annoys us we can always fill it with gap filler later. He was right, now the furniture is in we don't notice any gaps or unevenness at all. Overall experience was good and outcome was excellent; but never .. ever get wooden floors too wet as the water has nowhere to go and they could lift. Someone told us that their floorboards had lifted due to salt damp rising from external walls. We painted the foundation with a waterproofing substance before paving to reduce salt damp issues but you may not have the type of soil that Adelaide is renown for i.e. heavy clay and high salt content. I'd get solid wood. The price difference between solid and engineered is not that different. Good luck Casa. We avoided Boral for a number of reasons i.e. previous experience. Re: Flooring options 3Oct 13, 2008 11:15 am With hardwood timber floors onto a concrete slab the best option is using plywood underlay. 12-13mm boards can be used to balance out the costs compared to using the battens as they would require 19mm boards. I don't like putting flooring on battens as this creates a hollow sounding floor.
Im not a fan of floating floors so I cant really comment much on them. Re: Flooring options 4Oct 13, 2008 6:56 pm I agree with I BUILD.
Whilst battens are the cheaper option, ply will give a much more solid underlay. You can use the cheapest ply available , often produced in places such as Chile and whilst doesn't meet Aust. standards its fine for underlay. The 12mm solid overlay flooring is generally limited to a maximum length board of 2.4m from memory. Hi there, I'm a conplete newbie to this, but I'm looking to put a floor down in my 6x9m shed. It's currently sitting on a 100mm thick concrete perimeter (dirt floor… 0 6468 Standard uninsulated double brick has an R value of around 0.7. An insulated standard 90mm stud timber frame can have an R value of around 2.7. Even if you insulate a… 17 12053 Howdy all. I am looking for feedback on what people would do to maximise and make an area as flat as possible. First, out the front of the house is a sloping hill, pretty… 0 20158 |