HI. I was hoping to get some opinions on a few things relating to replacing my kitchen floor joists. I had recently bought a house from 1906 and whilst stripping the kitchen I had came across some rot when my foot went through the floor. On investigation most of the joists were rotten at one end. I decided to take up the entire floor and make good.
Basically the floor was divided into three sections. Two were suspended timber floor separated by a sleeper wall and the third was concrete. For reasons I won't go into I removed the concrete section to have the same type of subfloor throughout the room.
Due to the poor quality of the sleeper walls I have removed all but the first course of brick with the intention of rebuilding with honeycomb sleeper walls. My initial question is whether a wall plate is required. The previous joists were resting on the sleeper wall directly and had no issues apart from at one end of the joists where the DPC was missing and I also noticed that the air bricks were blocked in that section. All others were ventilated well with good dpc and sound joists. I had intended on just installing DPC on top of each sleeper wall and have the joists just rest on that. The bricks are old pre war commons and are very very hard so I can not see the need of the wall plate in spreading load. What thoughts do people have?
I will be replacing the air bricks and adding adding extra to increase the ventilation but my other question is what size of gap is required in the honeycomb walls. I was hoping to get away with 25mm, understand 50mm to be the norm but read that there is no real exact measurement.
I can post a few pics if required. Thanks in advance.
Basically the floor was divided into three sections. Two were suspended timber floor separated by a sleeper wall and the third was concrete. For reasons I won't go into I removed the concrete section to have the same type of subfloor throughout the room.
Due to the poor quality of the sleeper walls I have removed all but the first course of brick with the intention of rebuilding with honeycomb sleeper walls. My initial question is whether a wall plate is required. The previous joists were resting on the sleeper wall directly and had no issues apart from at one end of the joists where the DPC was missing and I also noticed that the air bricks were blocked in that section. All others were ventilated well with good dpc and sound joists. I had intended on just installing DPC on top of each sleeper wall and have the joists just rest on that. The bricks are old pre war commons and are very very hard so I can not see the need of the wall plate in spreading load. What thoughts do people have?
I will be replacing the air bricks and adding adding extra to increase the ventilation but my other question is what size of gap is required in the honeycomb walls. I was hoping to get away with 25mm, understand 50mm to be the norm but read that there is no real exact measurement.
I can post a few pics if required. Thanks in advance.