reinforcing a floor from above???

[fredinitaly]

I have an upstairs floor which consists of 1 metre long hollow bricks between H bars with an inch of cement on top - seems odd to me but its quite common here in Italy. When you walk in one of the bedrooms above the floor bows and we get different views from "no problem" to "highly dangerous".

We've been told that we should put a reinforced cement floor on top with ties in the walls. This idea doesn't fill me with confidence because it doesn't fix the underlying weakness and puts extra weight on an aready weak floor and since the reinforcing grids are only connected with wire ties I don't see much extra strength being added.

I noticed that the dividing brick wall between the bedrooms was over a span of bricks, not even over a bar so I took that down and plan to replace it with a light partition wall - but the floor took the weight of the wall so perhaps its not so weak after all.

Does anyone have a view on the reinforcing from above option? The other options are to replace it entirely or just to support one or two of the H bars from below and spread the load above with laminate flooring.

Thanks

 

[masona]

Any chance of photo? Just to make sure we can understand what we are seeing.