I will be building a new house in Florida on a cement slab. Elevated to the required height to keep the alligators out and us high and dry. I would like to put wood floors inside part of the house and tile floors in the rest. The wood for the flooring is already about 80 years old and has been sitting down in Florida for several years. How is the best way to fasten the wood floor to the cement or try to float the floor. The rooms will be an open configuration with almost no wall on a 2500 sq ft house. Suggestion as to how to attach or lay the wood floor? Know How
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You will have to get some tar paper down over the cement first and put some 6 mil poly over the top of that to prevent moisture and mildew from attacking the bottom side of your floor. Then you will need to attach wood strips to the floor (normally called sleepers) , attach them with a hilti gun or what have you,then lay 3/4 `` T&G plywood over that as the sub floor or eqivelent so that you can lay your finish floor down on that. Good luck!!
I am no expert, but did a similar thing to our house and so far all is good. I used the foam padding sold for laminate floating floors over the slab, then glued all the tongue and groove solid wood flooring together one piece at a time and let the whole thing float. We don't heat or cool, so the temperature and humidity are pretty constant, so no big problem with shrinkage. I did opt for a base molding plus shoe to cover a pretty good size expansion area. Good luck.
Dan
Thanks for the thoughts. Did you have expansion joints or spaces. The reason is that the floor is going to cover in its own connected way, a lot of open spaces that will be goind around corners. About 1000 sq ft.
The room is almost 16 feet square, and I left nearly a 1/2 on all four sides, thus the need for double moldings to cover the gap. Just in case it swells. Humidity is supposed to be the enemy, but I think it is changing humidity levels that cause movement, good luck.
Dan
I live in Delray Beach in south Florida and have installed engineered wood flooring in all 3 of our bedrooms. To ensure that a vapor barrier was used under the cement, I taped black plastic on the bare concrete floor for a few days and then checked for moisture. Since there was no moisture, I proceeded to install the flooring using the glue recommended by the manufacturer (Hartco). It's been down 4 years in our master bedroom and I've had no problems with adhesion at all. I recently installed the same product in our other 2 bedrooms.
One thing you do have to check is the levelness of the slab. I believe the specs were no more than 3/16" dip/crown in 8 feet. I didn't have to do anything in our master, but I had to use floor leveling compound in the other two to bring them into spec.
Good luck on your project.
Terry