Sloping kitchen floor - help...

FTB-FTW

Hi all

Another flooring query I'm afraid! It's the weekend for it.

Spotted some nice laminate flooring that would look good in our kitchen. Currently kitchen has original floorboards, but there's a problem with them: they appear to sag towards the middle of the room.

Our cooker, which is standing on one side of the room is on a bit of a slope, so at present if we fill a frying pan with oil it will run towards the front of the pan. in other words the overall surface is not even.

Obviously we would not want to place laminate directly on top of a sloping floor so want to fix this problem first but I am wondering what our options are. Are we looking at completely replacing the boards? This would obviously be a huge job we are keen to avoid if at all possible, but I don't actually know if there's another way to fix the warping.

We've decided laminate is a good option because the current state of the floorboards is not all that attractive that it's worth restoring them, and also we are in an upstairs flat and worry about the noise we make on a daily basis.

fwor

It's possible that the joists that support them in the middle have either rotted, or were never installed properly.

I have the latter in an upstairs bathroom - the house has just been carelessly built, so all I did was to install a lot more extra cross-link beams to hold it all together (so that the flooring I was about to install would not crack).

Only way you're really going to know is to lift a few boards and see what's going on underneath...

MX5huggy

The first thing to establish is the floor sloping or the cooker not level.

Spill some frozen peas on the floor?

Laminate will worse then floor boards for your neighbours, but it depends of what footware you use more than anything.

If the boards have sagged and you want to fix the whole floor should come up, then you can sort the joists by putting fillets on top or extra pieces of wood along the lengths level.

I would ignore ( prop the oven so it's level) and put hard board of the floor then vyinal.

FTB-FTW

MX5huggy wrote: »

I would ignore ( prop the oven so it's level) and put hard board of the floor then vyinal.

Propping the oven seems like a sensible short term solution for safety as much as anything but we suspect it's not just the oven that's sloping because this is an issue we've had with other pieces of furniture in this room. Our freestanding larder is already having to be propped with wooden blocks.

Really not too keen on vinyl although I know you can get nicer stuff. I can't believe the laminate would be worse than bare floorboards for noise...as much as anything else, it would be sitting on another layer of materials (can't remember the name of the underlay stuff, but that) and would not have cracks between it!

FTB-FTW

fwor wrote: »

I have the latter in an upstairs bathroom - the house has just been carelessly built, so all I did was to install a lot more extra cross-link beams to hold it all together (so that the flooring I was about to install would not crack).

Thanks. Yes this seems entirely likely in our case as from everything we can make out, the house was not carefully put together (it's from around 1915 so is also quite old anyway). It was then poorly maintained by the previous owner over 30-odd years.

Can I just ask if you could put a tentative price on the work you had to do to remedy this problem? It sounds like you may have done this yourself but we are not DIY people.

ormus

laminate in a kitchen is not a good idea anyways.
proper tiles are much better. and more forgiving to lay on a poor floor.

a laminate floor needs a very level floor first.
by the sounds of it, your job costs will double, cause of the uneven floor.