Replacing Floorboards

Joined
23 Jul 2016
Messages
2
Reaction score
0
Country
United Kingdom
We're starting to improve on our home and fix a lot of bad decisions made by the previous owners and tradesmen who have worked here before.

One thing is the floorboards have been lifted in this bedroom and replaced with a board - the board is thinner than the floorboards therefore is a dip when the carpet is laid. Link to photo below.

I'd like to replace these with floorboards - is it easy enough as a DIY task? House was built in the 1950's.

Any tips, are floorboards standard size?

Kind Regards,
Brydo.

Photo: http://imgur.com/a/ZaEYN
 
Sponsored Links
Modern floorboards tend to be thinner so thr way to take out the discrepancy is to remove the offending section, pack the tops of the joists with thin ply or hardboard and replace. Fiddly but cheap fix. You need to ensure that the board is supported at the edges,
 

Yeah, draw on the existing and new boards like this, because the services are in notches, right under the surface.

57Rklwl.jpg

This way you or any future occupier won't put a screw/nail through anything and may help you or a tradesperson in the future and save some time/effort. Especially if you are intending to replace the large boards with indivdual ones again to match the existing.

Gaz :)
 
As above.
The problem seems to be that a ripped sheet of ply was used because of the lack of bearings for replacing with T&G floorboards, & screwing or nailing down might not have been possible.
Whats happened is that the joists have been notched too wide.

You could clap some bearing ledgers alongside the joists to perhaps give a little extra bearing.
Strips of sheet vinyl flooring make excellent packing for raising boards.

A couple of things:
There's no need to notch for cable, the joists should be drilled.
The pipes are too close, they should be spaced and clipped or you might end up with expansion "ticking" and squeaking.
If they couldn't thread the pipes through they could of at least used two smaller notches for two sets of pipe runs - spacing the notches to allow T&G edge bearing.
The old elec. conduit should be removed as far as possible - always remove redundant pipes, conduits and cables.
 
Sponsored Links
Thank you all for the input.

The space that's missing I have the plywood sitting aside. I'm thinking it may be easier for me to source something to use as a spacer (Offcut of ply?) and re-use the existing board albeit sitting at the correct height?

Everything, and I mean everything in this house has been done to a poor job prior to our purchase. We're slowly rectifying things - full rewire has just been completed hence the conduits are all empty.
 
OP, I dont understand what you mean by a "spacer"?

Where a ripping of ply could be used with T&G boards is tight to the wall (after lifting the last T&G board next to the wall) and working out the best ply width (a spacer?) in terms of where you might safely land the T&G boards.
For example, first a ripping of ply, and then, say, three or four T&G boards.

Whoever did the re-wire did you no favours - they could have removed the conduit and run the cables in the conduit notch if they were too lazy or ignorant to drill the joists.
 
Last edited:
I had a much worse issue with notched joists.

Two worst areas were the hall and living room. Hall had so many services going under the floor, that after a rewire it was impossible to get the floorboards back down. It was made worse by the old steel conduit sitting above the level of the joists.

The living room had really narrow 70mm boards, so it was impossible to get a good fix. To fix this I opened up all the 1-width gaps to 2 or 3-width gaps to ensure the ply had a good fix.

The solution was to replace n-widths of floorboard with 25mm thick plywood, packing underneath so that it was level, then overboard the lot with 6mm plywood. Took ages, but its a smooth, draught-free floor now.

The plastic spacers are joinery spaces, and come in 1,2,3,4,5, and 6mm thicknesses. Recesses were cut underneath the 25mm ply to accomodate the conduit. Initially I used a small plunge saw and a chisel, but later borrowed a router, which was much faster.

1662334_10153074994690817_5273910562446559852_n.jpg 12316460_10153472685055817_3792887803723335170_n.jpg 12208257_10153451906920817_2062066225663457101_n.jpg 12191952_10153438759265817_3181757409250787134_n.jpg 12196137_10153438759205817_2471499719430059205_n.jpg 10955331_10153435313265817_7755347867926352298_n.jpg
 
As a minor point to anyone looking for "joinery spacers" - they are generally called "packers" or "horse shoe packers" within the trade up here. At least that's what our suppliers call them. We buy them in bags of 2500 per size (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10mm - yellow, green, blue, brown, black and grey respectively) but we also use 100 x 50mm rips of 4, 6, 10, 12 and 18mm ply from offcuts (too small and they just become fiddly to use). Smaller mixed packs can be had from Selco, Tool Station, etc. Hardboard, MDF, chipboard, etc cannot be used where there is any possibility of water/damp so we generally avoid those materials
 

DIYnot Local

Staff member

If you need to find a tradesperson to get your job done, please try our local search below, or if you are doing it yourself you can find suppliers local to you.

Select the supplier or trade you require, enter your location to begin your search.


Are you a trade or supplier? You can create your listing free at DIYnot Local

 
Sponsored Links
Back
Top