DIY wooden house floor repair

No matter how well the house is built, over time, it will be necessary to carry out current or major repairs. Overlap and floor often suffer from damage of various kinds. Therefore, the owners of houses made from natural materials should know how the floor is replaced in a wooden house.

Wooden floor

It is possible to decide whether repairs are needed or not by external signs, among them the most obvious:

• Floorboards squeak under load.
• The floor flexes under the weight of the furniture.
• Differences in floor level are visible, water flows in one direction.
• Cracks and gaps between the floorboards.
• The wood is rotten and crumbles, even with a slight impact on it.

Before repairing floors in a stalinka or other wooden building, you need to check their condition. Diagnostics will help determine the scope of work. You need to examine:

1. Boards. Partial replacement may be necessary if rotten areas are found.
2. Lags - they can also be damaged.
3. Beams for the "work" of beetles and other pests.
4. It will not be superfluous to examine the subfloor, if it is seriously damaged, then it will have to be replaced.

Lags requiring replacement

Note! Do not flatter yourself if it seems that the finished floor is in perfect condition, checking the lags and the subfloor are required. After all, the problem sometimes lurks in the depths, and if it is not detected in time, the consequences will be unpleasant. It is better to repair the floor in a wooden house sooner rather than later.

The check is carried out according to several parameters:

• Sound, so beams, beams and floorboards follow. To do this, tap on a wooden surface with a hammer. A dull sound means that the wood is rotten.
• The appearance of the nails. From them it will be possible to see where the floorboard is rotten. In damaged areas, fasteners are rusty due to the effects of putrefactive processes.
• Checking lags consists in probing with an awl. They need to walk the entire length of the log. Ideally, the awl should not easily be driven into the wood, if so, then the supports are rotten and a lot of work will have to be done. Rot is most likely to form at the ends of the beams.

You can determine the degree of necessary repairs as follows:

• If an external examination showed that there are cracks, paint peeled off in places and other minor imperfections, then a partial repair is carried out.
• If there is a creak, then you need to replace individual lags.
• If a too cold floor is found, complete disassembly and insulation is necessary, since during the construction process they saved this.

Any damage to the floor can be repaired, only the costs, duration and complexity of the repair depend on the defects found.

Wooden floor in need of replacement

Such work is needed if the detected defects are not critical. Do not forget about checking all floor levels if there are no defects in them, which rarely happens, because the floors are not 5 or 10 years old.

Redecoration consists of sealing cracks and cracks. This is done in several ways:

• Repair using putties.
• Sealing with glue and sawdust mixtures.
• Clogging of cracks with slats.

Any of these options will not take a lot of resources and time. After completing the work, the floor is again as good as new and will serve for many more years.

Often, repairs to an old wooden floor in a private house are carried out when it is impossible not to notice wear and tear. In most cases, the floorboards need to be replaced. In the most difficult situations, there are also lags and a rough floor. Such measures will be needed by the owners of houses whose floors are more than 40 years old, wood is not metal, it has its own resource.And given the fact that previously such attention was not paid to wood processing and its isolation from negative factors, overhaul is the only measure.

Partial floor board replacement

"Stalinkas" are residential buildings that were built during the Soviet era, until the beginning of the 60s of the last century. Such structures have characteristic features:

• High ceilings.
• Large windows and spacious rooms inside.
• Wooden floors between floors.
• Wooden floors.

Many owners who live in such houses are interested in how to replace the wooden floor in the stalinka. There are many options, but you still can't do without lags and a rough floor.

Reconstruction measures for wood flooring in stalinka or other types of houses are similar.

• Dismantle the old floor.
• Install new lags.
• Equip the sub-floor.
• Warming.
• Install a clean floor.

• Hand saw or chainsaw.
• Hammer.
• Nail puller.

On the floorboard in old houses there is an additional coating - linoleum, carpet and others. They are removed along with the baseboards. With the latter, you need to act carefully, it may turn out to be reused.

• Note! Particular difficulties arise just in the "stalinka", in Soviet times it was difficult to find suitable fasteners, so a sheet of hardboard was nailed with nails 5 cm, when removing them from the board, problems arise.

To dismantle the boards, you will need to find a gap. With the help of a crowbar or a nail puller, or better both, pry the board and rip it off. You need to pry it along the entire length so as not to damage it if it is intact. Then you should pull out the nails. So remove both the finishing and the rough floor, if any.

After that, you should not delude yourself to inspect the state of the lag, most likely, it is catastrophic. They can be damaged by the bark beetle or completely rotted.

Dismantling the subfloor

If the situation is not so critical, then the logs must also be carefully dismantled by unscrewing them from the beams and support pillars. In cases where a wooden house rests on embedded beams, the process of replacing the floor is accompanied by jacking up the house. This is necessary to replace the beams at the anchor points.

Before installing, clarify whether it is necessary to drain the basement and grout the foundation. If dampness is detected in the subfield, drainage is necessary, which will increase the time required to repair the floor. If there are places with a damaged foundation, you need to add it and wait until it dries.

Check the condition of the support posts. For laying new lags, the elements must be serviceable. It happens that in the old structures of wooden houses there are no posts at all, they are installed before mounting the supports. Steps when installing a lag:

• Marking on the support beams of the sections for fastening the beams. If there are columns, then their markings.
• Determine the angles of the posts in the longitudinal and transverse planes.
• Treatment of lags with an antiseptic will extend the service life several times.
• Further, the posts are waterproofed.
• Lags are laid on them and fixed. In this case, it is necessary to reach a horizontal level, if in some places there are protrusions, process the supports with a plane.
• To fasten the lags to the support beams, self-tapping screws of the required length are used, for the support posts - dowels.

The permissible deviation of the level of the lags is within 1 mm per 1 meter.

Rough or bottom floorboards are needed so that there is where to mount the insulation. For it you need a rough board with a thickness of at least 2 cm, preferably 4. They must be dried and treated with an antiseptic. Installation of boards is carried out across the logs with fastening to the beams. Wooden boards can be nailed or screwed on with self-tapping screws.

Although the floor is rough, there should be no gaps in it; they are blown out with polyurethane foam, if they are found. After the foam dries, cut off the excess.

Installation of new lags

The wooden floor needs insulation. To do this, use a variety of materials, it is important to lay a layer of waterproofing and a vapor barrier when arranging any of them.The first is laid on the subfloor before laying the insulation, the second - on top of it. Insulation options:

• Budget solutions: sawdust or expanded clay.
• Mineral wool.
• Ecowool.
• Izolon.
• Expanded polystyrene.

Regardless of the type of insulation chosen, it is necessary to ensure tightness, it is most important for isolon and expanded polystyrene, since these materials are sheet and dense, not self-filling.

Rough floor

The upper or final wooden floor is mounted on top of the insulation, on the logs. The moisture content of wooden boards should not be more than 12%, thickness from 4 cm. It is more convenient to work with grooved ones, such have a groove-comb system. This eliminates the formation of through cracks when the wood dries up.

You need to start flooring from the corner of the room farthest from the door. The first board is laid with a comb against the wall, and a nail is driven into it. Moreover, the distance from the wall to the first board should be at least 1 cm. This ventilation gap is required. On the other hand, screw in a self-tapping screw or drive a nail at an angle of 45 degrees into the groove. Screw the rest of the boards to the logs on one side - into the groove.

In the event that the length of the boards is less than the length of the room, they are mounted at random - about 1 meter. This is necessary so that the joints of the ends do not coincide.

Before installation, floorboards must be treated with an antiseptic, which will exclude the development of mold, fungi and other damage characteristic of wood on the surface and inside the material.

Upon completion of the work, the flooring is sanded and varnished. If it is not planned to install another coating on it. In situations where additional flooring is planned, sheets of plywood or chipboard should be mounted on top, and linoleum, laminate or parquet should be installed on them.

Insulation mounted on a sub-floor

Difficulties even in a large-scale repair of a wooden floor should not arise. The technology for replacing the subfloor, lags and finished floor is similar for a private house or for an apartment. The key requirement for a new floor to last a long time is the use of dry wood materials and treatment with an antiseptic.

How pleasant it is to walk barefoot on the warm wooden floor! But what if the floor is no longer so smooth, if it is already covered with a thick layer of paint, if an unpleasant draft blows through the cracks in it, and the floorboards themselves creak and sag under your weight? There are different ways to answer this question. And these answers depend on several conditions - the knowledge and skills of the owner, his financial capabilities and his own desires and imaginations. You understand, with such a variety, you can do anything - from covering the floors with another coat of paint to completely replacing the old wooden floor with one of the modern floor coverings. Therefore, now we will talk about repairing a wooden floor - from the simplest to the major one.

When planning to put the floors in order, you should determine exactly what exactly your floor needs at the moment - renewal of the coating, routine repairs, overhaul or complete replacement of the flooring. Let's go through each of the options:

• the renewal of the coating must be carried out every 2-5 years, depending on the coating itself and on the condition of the floor under it - it is usually carried out either on a planned basis (as follows according to the instructions), or as the previous layer wears off in places subject to the greatest stress
• normal repairs are done when the floor begins to sag slightly and creak underfoot, when gaps form between the floorboards and the boards begin to "lift" the edges
• major repairs are required in two cases - if you decide on a complete renovation of the apartment or your floor begins to rot and deform to a complete disgrace
• a complete replacement of the flooring is performed during the global renovation of the entire home with the replacement of “outdated” finishes with more modern ones

Only one thing can be said about the durability of floors made of massive wooden boards - if high-quality material was used (properly dried boards without rot and excess knotty, treated with protective impregnations), and they were properly looked after, then such floors can last up to 150 years without a complete replacement. Therefore, we will only consider renovations - you are unlikely to live in a house where wooden floors were laid over 100 years ago.

Any business consists of three stages - preparation, the actual business and the final finishing. Repair of wooden floors will not be an exception to the rule. It's just that in each specific case of repair, the steps in the stages will be slightly different. And let's start with the most laborious.

Usually, when overhauling a floor, they carry out a partial replacement of floorboards (rotten, cracked or broken) and work on insulation, vapor barrier or even laying a system of "warm floors" (you can read about them in other articles - the whole process for different types of warm floors is indicated in detail - electric, water and film). And the scheme for the overhaul of wooden floors looks like this:

1. Preparing floors for renovation:

• remove the skirting board
• if the boards are painted with oil paint, it must be removed to clean wood
• the floor boards are numbered so that later it would be convenient to lay them back
• carefully remove the floorboards, determining their suitability for further use (damaged boards must be replaced with new ones, and it is not necessary to throw out the whole board if only some part is rotten - in this case, you can remove a low-quality piece and put a more durable one in its place)
• floor boards from the inside (facing down) side should be treated with a special impregnation that protects against mold and decay - this way they will last much longer
• remove all debris from the "subfloor" until the concrete base (or floor slab) appears
• you can remove the lags, or at least carefully inspect them for the integrity of the material - the bars that have become unusable need to be replaced

1. We carry out all the necessary work to improve our floors:

• we lay insulation between the logs, various materials can be used as insulation - from expanded clay to mineral wool and foam

• a vapor barrier - we lay the film strips overlapping (about 20 centimeters) and fix them to each other with foil tape (the simplest vapor barrier is a plastic film, but you can use more expensive and reliable materials, such as penofol)
• we lay the floor boards - according to the numbers printed in the process of removal
• we fix the boards to the logs using self-tapping screws - this is more reliable than using nails (we deepen the screws into the surface of the tree by 3-5 mm)

• we check the horizontal of the floor with a spirit level (level), and where the edges of the boards protrude behind each other with a noticeable discrepancy in height, we go through the plane
• roughly leveled floors are looped to make the surface even (differences in height of a couple of millimeters per linear meter are permissible)

• we putty the cracks (if any) and the places of deepening of the self-tapping screws, we grind the filled places again
• we remove all debris - with a brush, vacuum cleaner, damp cloth

• we treat clean and even wood of our renovated floor with protective impregnations (if we are going to paint the floor with ordinary oil paint, then ordinary drying oil can serve as such impregnation)

• put the plinth

1. Our floors are almost ready for use, all that remains is to apply a finishing protective coating, for example:

• varnish - today this is the most popular coating, because in addition to excellent protective properties, varnish allows you to fully enjoy the beauty of the tree itself

• paint - special floor paints allow you to keep our floor strong for a long time and give it any color
• oil - modern oils for wood floors penetrate deep into the wood, making it more wear-resistant and durable, but still it is better to use them as an impregnation
• wax - the excellent effect of waxed wood has been known for a long time, however, it requires constant and rather expensive maintenance

Not that much effort, right? Of course, it takes a lot of time, but the result is worth it - practically new floors at quite modest prices. For those who are interested in the opportunity to independently make a major overhaul of a wooden floor - a video where all the work is done by the hands of the owners under the strict guidance of a specialist.