Repair of apartments and private houses is often associated with the installation of new flooring. One of the problems associated with this is the need for additional work to level the wooden base, which has various defects and irregularities. How to level a wooden floor and will be discussed in this article.
In modern construction, there are several basic ways to level a wooden floor for installing a new floor covering on top of it. Some of them involve working directly with wood, others involve applying various leveling compounds and sheet materials without dismantling boards and logs.
The first group includes:
- Manual alignment.
The photo shows two fundamental approaches to leveling a wooden base. The first - with the help of flooring sheet materials. The second is mechanical processing of the floor surface with a grinder. The second group includes:
- Leveling with sheet wood materials (plywood, chipboard and fiberboard).
- Leveling with cement screed.
- Alignment bulk floors.
Let us consider each of these methods in more detail, their nuances and features, the main mistakes made by non-professionals in their implementation.
Leveling wood floors by hand
If you find on the floor boards an abundance of protruding places, located, as a rule, near the knots in the boards, you must try to eliminate them. First make sure the log is strong, which serve as the basis for the existing and new coating.
Rotten, collapsed bars will not be able to withstand the weight of the new and old floor in the house. They will have to be replaced or the installation of a new base in the form of a concrete screed.
In the case of sufficient strength, the log can be safely leveled with a wooden floor. To work, you will need the following tools:
- Axe;
- Electric planer;
- Any type of grinder (belt, vibration, etc.).
Examine the surface of the boards and mark problem areas with a pencil or chalk. With a sharply sharpened ax in the direction of the wood fibers, you can roughly cut down protruding places of great height. Irregularities a few millimeters high can be easily smoothed out with a planer.
When working with mechanical tools, pay special attention to the presence of protruding heads of nails and screws in the boards, which can irreparably damage the knives.
Before leveling an old wooden floor with mechanical planing, go over the entire surface, deepen the fasteners or remove them altogether.
For the first type of work, it is convenient to make a simple finisher by cutting off a part of a rod with a cap 50-70 mm long from a nail No. 120 or 150. Having installed the device on top of the nail, with a few blows of the hammer, deepen it into the board and the log by 3-4 mm. To remove, use pliers or a nail puller, knocking it out with a hammer.
Perform the final alignment of the boards with a grinder, connecting a vacuum cleaner hose to it to reduce the dustiness of the room in the house. By alternating sandpaper with different abrasive grain sizes, you can get a perfectly flat, smooth surface.
If the quality of processing is high, you can do without updating the flooring by getting a sanded floor in several layers.
Scraping floor leveling
Manual scraping has been used in carpentry for a long time, but it allows you to remove only micron layers of wood. Leveling a wooden floor is best done with a mechanical scraper, which can be rented from the relevant construction organizations.
The principle of its operation is similar to the principle of operation of an electric planer, but it is more adapted to leveling, flattening a horizontal surface. Similar to the process described above, possible metal defects on the surface must be carefully eliminated. This is especially true in an old house or apartment, where the floorboards were not fastened in the “hidden”, but from above.
If the need for laying a new floor covering is acute, then after mechanical sanding the floor surface can not be sanded.
Leveling the floor with sheet materials
The most common way to obtain a flat base is to lay wood-based panels on top of it. This method has several advantages over those described above:
- Before leveling a wooden floor with plywood, there is no need for careful leveling.
- The process is available to any master who has a jigsaw and a screwdriver in his arsenal.
- Minimum waste during work.
If it is necessary to raise the level of the base, the sheets can be attached not to the boards, but to small logs made of bars with a section of 20x50 or 30x50, attached to the floor with self-tapping screws. It is necessary to position the crate so that the joints of individual sheets are located on its elements. The frequency of installation of new logs should not exceed a distance of 40-50 cm.
Leveling with concrete screed
Another fairly versatile way to level the floor, which can be done without tearing off old boards. It makes higher demands on the strength of the log, as the load on them increases due to the high mass of the concrete layer.
This option has the advantage of minimal pre-treatment. Before leveling the wooden floor in the house with a concrete mixture, it is only necessary to carefully examine the condition of the floor lag and the tightness of the boards to each other. The last aspect is related to the liquid component of the mixture. If there are large gaps, it is recommended to pre-fill them with mounting foam, cutting it flush with the floor after hardening.
For leveling with concrete you will need:
- a sufficient number of components of the mixture - sand, cement and water;
- mechanical concrete mixer;
- device for leveling concrete on the floor;
- sheet steel beacons or self-tapping screws fixed to the floor at the required level.
Portions of the liquid mixture are laid out on the prepared base, distributed with a trowel or spatula and leveled with a meter-long metal rail - the rule. After the concrete layer has hardened, after a few days, they begin to install the floor covering.
Self-leveling floor on wooden boards
A relatively new type of steel is self-leveling floors - mixtures based on various polymer compositions, which, after solidification, form a smooth, perfectly even horizontal layer on the surface of the base. It is possible to use this type of mixtures for leveling wooden floors.
It should be noted that this type is one of the most expensive of all described in today's review. In addition, the use of such a composition also requires high strength of wooden logs. This is due to a significant increase in the load on them. The video clearly shows the process of creating a self-leveling surface on a wooden floor.
There is no need to control the filling level, it is enough just to correctly distribute it with a special gear device called a squeegee. You need to move along the non-hardened self-leveling floor on special wooden platforms based on steel spikes - wet shoes.
Thus, as part of this review, we examined the main ways of leveling a wooden floor, provided that the log and boards for laying one or another type of flooring are preserved. Each of them has its own characteristics, advantages and disadvantages, the choice of the final option depends on the specific conditions.
