Solid wood flooring on top of floorboards?

[OllieUK]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of performing a much needed house makeover and I've run into something that has split opinions a bit. The upstairs of my house has pine floorboards, the bottom concrete; I want to put solid wood flooring in the living room and bedrooms (and possibly kitchen, subject to debate).

The living room has a concrete base so will simply be a case of underlay -> flooring. The upstairs, however, I'm not sure about.

Should I put underlay and then the flooring directly onto the floorboards, which would result in the floors being raised by ~2-2.5cm? In this scenario I imagine I'd have to plane the bottoms off the doors. This creates the problem however that we aren't going to put new flooring on the upper landing necessarily, so there might be a strange change in floor height (or..? suggestions welcome).

Alternatively, should I take up the floorboards in the bedrooms and replace them with something like MDF -> underlay -> flooring, in order to retain approximately the current floor height?

Thanks,
Ollie

 

[Chri5]

The ground floor will be floating, stuck together or laid on a sticky underlayment.

Upstairs you need to nail, tongue tight screw or float per the ground floor.

In the hall I assume you will use a carpet and underlay. Hardwood floor 18mm plus underlay = ~22mm, carpet plus cloud type underlay will be roughly the same.

No problem then

 

[crazydaze]

If you are going to float the floor, buy an engineered product, it will be far more stable and won't open up seasonally.

If you are fitting a solid, the concrete needs to be moisture checked, then screeded, then bond the wood to the screed. Upstairs, you need to ply the floorboards with 9mm ply, then secret nail the wood to the ply.