Floor boards

Back in entry no. 99 we talked about the floor boards and why we ended up going for a bamboo floor. So we won't repeat that all over again here.

When it came to laying the floor boards we have always been a bit concerned about the hardness of concrete. As such, we ended up going with a system from Sika called Sika®AcouBond. The process is best described in pictures:

First, the rubber mat is cut to size of the room and laid down on the floor.

Close up of the slots in the mat, where the glue will go.

Glue is placed in the slots using a glue gun. The glue actually comes in sausages that fit inside the gun, something that is reducing the waste considerably, compared to the hard plastic cylinders that are used for silicon, etc.

The full width is glued, enough to put down 3-4 boards (in depth) at the time.

The boards were then pressed down into the glue. As the boards were with tongue and groove and end-matched it was quite an easy job to lay them on the floor. You just start at one end, and then cut the final board. The cut part is then used as the first board on the next line, etc. As such, there is very little waste at the end of it.

The buckets filled with blue metal was used as weights to put pressure on the boards. Additionally, it was necessary to take a break after 8 or 9 lines of boards, and then cramp them together. We generally used long pieces of timber for this purpose.

Most of the bedroom floor now completed.

And here is the walk in wardrobe all done.

As the process basically was the same all over the house, we did not bother taking more pictures of this. At least it gives an impression of how it is done.

Now the only thing we have found with this is that we have a bit of a creaky sound in some of the boards. As we are using the floor, this seems to disappear and we are hoping that it will eventually all go away. We are not really sure what this has happened, but the most likely reason is that the rubber mat is giving some movement up and down with the boards and where they are joined together, this is causing that bit of creaky noise. But as mentioned, in the high traffic areas it seems to be reducing and hopefully this means that when it has all settled we won't hear more of it.

We really do not know whether it is due to the Acoubond system (i.e. that you only have slots filled with glue, and not glue under the full floor board, whether it was bad handy work from us, or if it is due to the floor being bamboo and not hard wood. We might never know, but if someone out there has similar experiences, please let us know.

Any problems, please email webmaster. This page was last updated 24/07/2008