Putting in a new floor

One of the biggest worries up until now was the floor in the main living room area. This is the area that was a hay barn and which was officially classed as "agricultural" until we got the planning permission to change it to "living room". The floor area is about 100 square metres, of which about half was covered in a concrete floor. This has been laid on top of the existing floorboards, which covered the existing joists. Given that only about half of the floor area had a concrete floor (about 5cm high), there was a step in the middle. The original idea was to either keep the step or to fill up the step (i.e. half of the room area) with insulation and then put underfloor heating on top of the whole lot. However, concerns for the stability of the roof meant that we needed to check the condition of the floor joists as they are responsible not only for holding up the floor, but also for tying the roof together. Problems with floor joists could thus very quickly lead to problems with the roof. Given that we are putting a new roof on, which weighs a lot more than the existing one, we did not want problems arising.

Thus, we decided to take up the concrete floor. With a big crowbar as a lever, a big sledge and a small sledge, it took a weekend to pull up the concrete in big slabs and to throw it out and into a hired skip (cost €140, by the way - about 5 cubic metres of concrete). Once the concrete was up we were able to have a look at the condition of the floor boards. The verdict was that the floor boards were not really safe at all. Towards the west side of the house they were ok-ish. Towards the middle, they were actually dangerous. Some had rotted and there was evidence of substantial woodworm damage. Another thing that became evident was that the joist spacing was far too big - the joists (albeit big at 18cm by 16cm) were spaced at over a metre from centre to centre. Using the DIN standard for calculating minimum load bearing floor thickness, this would have meant about 5cm thick boards (or OSB). Another problem was that the floor was not level at all. Over the entire length of the room (about 12 metres) there were differences of up to 4 centimetres.

To get a better idea of whether there was going to be problems down the road for the roof, we decided to take up the floor boards (many of them were rotted through anyway). This brought another issue to light. Apparently, before the concrete floor went in on top of the floor boards, the area had been used to store grain and hay. Over the years, grain had filtered through the gaps between the floor boards and had collected above the arches of the ground floor. It took roughly 80 wheelbarrows full to get rid of it! Each wheelbarrow was 7 buckets. Each of those buckets had to be carried down on a ladder.

Once the grain was taken care of, we could take a good look at the joists. In summary, many of them were in quite good condition (surprisingly, really) but one was completely rotted through in the middle and another one (the one carrying one of the roof props) had been badly damaged in the middle by woodworm.



To get the floor up to scratch, we decided to:

1. Supplement the existing joists with new ones to reduce the spacing
2. Strap additional planks onto the sides of the existing joists to raise them up
3. Replace the damaged joists
4. Replace the badly damaged roof prop (the one embedded in a concrete wall)

We enlisted Johannes Stuckenberger for help with adding the joists, leveling the floor and fixing the decayed roof prop. On January 22nd (2013) two of his men started working on the joists. They quickly added the new joists using a laser level. They also quickly raised up the existing joists using new planks bolted to the sides of the existing ones. They then started working on the roof prop. That turned out to be substantially more work than anticipated because of a concrete platform (overhead the shower in the party room) and a concrete "nose" into which the bottom of the decayed prop was embedded. It turned out that we needed to completely remove the concrete platform - which in turn meant removing the ceiling of the shower. At the end of the day, it will probably work out better anyway - we can fix a new shower ceiling to the underside of the new joists.

On the 23rd of January, the two carpenters from Stuckenberger continued working on the floor. There was more work to be done with leveling. Between the joists they also had to fix light boards to take the insulation (i.e. to stop the insulation from dropping down around the arches of the party room below). Below is a picture of how the room now looks - the spacing is now much more acceptable and we can use 25mm OSB instead of 50mm or 60mm as would have been necessary. It should also be a relatively simple job to add the insulation and the OSB on top of the joists, as the floor should be perfectly level.