Nail-free wood floors best option over basement subfloor tiles
What’s the best way to secure hardwood flooring to basement subfloor tiles? Though these tiles aren’t normally fastened to the concrete floor, some people say they should be before hardwood flooring goes down.
Basement subfloor tiles are part of a revolution in building materials making finished basements so much more comfortable, and there are various designs on the market. Most subfloor tiles use 24- by 24-inch pieces of 7/16-inch-thick waferboard (more properly called oriented strand board or OSB) glued to a plastic or foam base.
The U.S. National Wood Flooring Association specifically recommends that hardwood flooring can be nailed directly to an 18-millimetre OSB subfloor, which is a little thicker than the OSB on subfloor tiles. I’d use flathead tapcon screws to secure the perimeter of the subfloor just to be sure, then fasten a layer of 3/8-inch-thick plywood underlay on top of the subfloor tiles, using a little wood glue and staples. This provides more wood for your hardwood flooring nails to grip into.
A better alternative is the newer types of click-style hardwood flooring or engineered flooring. Although made of wood, they click and lock together just like laminates, without nails. What can I do about mould growing along one wall of my finished basement? There’s nothing pushed against the wall, the area is well ventilated, and I run a dehumidifier all summer. The problem started when a neighbour installed a fence seven metres away. Could that somehow be the cause?
I don’t think the fence could be the culprit, but the root of the problem is ultimately moisture. Mould and mildew grow only in the presence of sufficient moisture, so we need to figure out how the moisture is getting into your wall from behind the drywall.
My suspicion is that it’s seeping through the foundation wall and making the finished wall damp from behind. That’s why I’d recommend cutting an exploratory hole in the drywall to see what’s going on underneath.
Choose an area with maximum mildew growth, making the hole about two or three inches in diameter. That should be enough to see what’s happening but not so much that patching would be a hassle if there proved to be no problem. Use a utility knife or small saw, being careful to keep cutting action from going deeper than the drywall, in case wires are there.
If you find moist conditions inside, then stripping, sealing and replacing the interior wall surface will be required. If the mildew is superficial, then treating with Concrobium followed by lowered humidity levels will do the trick. What can I do to get permission to have the bare concrete floor in my condo polished as a finished floor? We’ve removed the carpet, but the condo board says this will cause noise issues with the people below. What can we do?
Noise transmission between condo units is becoming a problem as more people move away from carpet to hard-surface floors. This is why various condo boards have policies about floor coverings and sound transmission. Sound blocking capabilities are measured in a couple of ways, with a sixinch-thick concrete floor having a sound transmission class (STC) rating of about 53, or an impact insulation class (IIC) rating of 27.
Although these figures are over the bare minimum required by most building codes, in practice, concrete alone won’t be sufficient to keep the sound of footsteps and moving furniture away from neighbours.
Generally speaking, most condo boards require more than STC 60 on floors because that’s what’s required for proper sound blocking, but even that’s not great.
If you want a hard-surface floor and happy neighbours, I recommend an acoustic rubber underlay with a wood-based floor on top.