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Laying a solid wood floor.... can anyone advised.... is it best to put underlay under the floor or just go wood to wood and glue the underside


Tony ralph

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Solid wood not laminate or engineered ?

 

I put some oak flooring in my kitchen at home and laid that on building paper secret nailed to the wood floor underneath. 

On a boat think I would lay on a very thin underlay or building paper type material and glue the tongue and grooves. Glueing to the boat floor seems a very bad idea to me. 

Leave some expansion gaps at the edges. 

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1 hour ago, jonathanA said:

I put some oak flooring in my kitchen at home and laid that on building paper secret nailed to the wood floor underneath. 

You secret nailed the building paper? That's a new one on me!

 

For the OP I would suggest use underlay, glue the joints, and leave an expansion gap around the edges, i.e. a floating floor not attached to the sub floor. And only use this flooring in areas you will never need to lift!

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If you glue a real tree wood floor to ply without any underlay you are going to have real trouble with movement, particularly if a wet winter follows a hot dry summer.  The wood will want to move, the plywood won't, to any great extent.

David Mack's floating floor is the way to go, but I would want either an underlay with a good vapour barrier or some heavy gauge polythene DPC as the bottom layer. 

 

Ensure the bilge is (still) well ventilated and that you can get at the low points to deal with any water in there.

 

N

I think secret nailing building paper can possibly  be done with drawing pins.

 

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^^^ That's how I laid solid oak flooring in a kitchen - thick plastic barrier (not mega thick, came on a roll about 2 meters wide) then laid felt on top of that, then the wood totally floating. If you fix permanently to the subfloor, apart from the expanding / contracting mentioned above, if you ever need to change it you will then have the problem of removing the ply with all the associated problems of fitted furniture, walls etc.

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3 hours ago, David Mack said:

You secret nailed the building paper? That's a new one on me

Very drool....

 

I knew the hard of thinking would probably read it that way...

 

And sure enough they walked right into my trap...

 

That's my story anyway.

 

I'm glad to see the collective wisdom is as  I suggested and the OP has some good advice along with the usual forum joshing of course ...

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Done a few floors in a house none on a boat, but some tips that might be of some use.

I measured the rooms that I wanted to lay the floors on three times and got the right measurments.

After that a scale drawing was done - this saved me one complete pack of flooring as I knew where to lay the odd lengths as starters for the next row.

The long corridor was a real pain to get in a straight line and the correct gap between the wall and the first length of boards. The answer was to measure and glue up three complets lengths, once the glue had dried they could be moved into position as one unit.

By doing the scale drawing I could make sure that the last run of boards were not to thin by cutting the first run boards narrower.

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Yep that's what I referred to before the shining wits (as the revd Spooner would say)  jumped in, using something like this and special t shaped nails (cleats)

 

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://smithshire.com/products/secret-nailer-porta/&ved=2ahUKEwiHiOb_vJT6AhVuSEEAHaEPAAAQFnoECAoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2R9kGkzlO_p88MePutBTHR

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