leveling floor

Hi, i'm just about to start building my little recording/rehearsal room. my old design thread Before I can begin to build the wooden frames, i have to do something with the floor to have a flat base for straight walls. The highest and lowermost points of the floor in my room are 4,5cm apart (1,77inch). Most of the floor is about 1-2cm apart and one corner is 'much' deeper. What to do?!

• Fill the whole floor with self leveling compound (~1000kg = ~ 1000eur :( )
• Fill the deep corner with self leveling compound and live with the 1-2cm level difference in the rest of the room
• Fill a 'ring' under the framed walls to have a leveled floor under them while leaving the 'inner floor' as is (5m^2 instead of 30m^2 to level)

Problem with the first point... every self leveling compound seems to have a min AND max thickness. Until now, I have not found a product that can handle ~5cm. Problem with the second point... whats flat? are 1-2cm a problem building a wooden frame on it? Problem with the third point... I would get a little step (0-5cm) that can possibly break under the weight of the walls. Visualizations of point 3: Also in reality the floor looks reasonably flat...but it has differences in height of >4cm I would/could add a flat concrete ring after removing the old tiles. white: concrete leveled floor/step; black: resilient pad zoom into the deepest corner, therefore highest step onto the concrete ring ~4-5 cm I would be happy if I don't have to fill the whole floor with concrete or self lev. comp. I was not sure whether the floor is flat or not. It was not very conspicuous to me. I saw it with a leveling laser (advertisement pic) Does anybody feel like helping me to decide? Any experiences? best regards andy

does the floor just suddenly slope there or is it gradual enough that you might find moving around the floor to feel awkward? if it's just a matter of height, then ripping down some lumber to level things should do it.

gullfo wrote:

does the floor just suddenly slope there or is it gradual enough that you might find moving around the floor to feel awkward? if it's just a matter of height, then ripping down some lumber to level things should do it.

Just to make sure I've got your question right: You ask me whether the floor slopes as a whole or just smaller parts are higher/deeper? I think the whole floor slopes down to this particular corner, maybe 1-2cm on the length of ~5m. This corner itself has a steeper slope - another ~2cm on the last 1m. Ripping of lumber from the baseplate of the wall to make it fit to the corrugation seems to be very laborious to me (I have no experience in doing this) but this is exactly why I ask more experienced people! Thanks for this tip! But do you think the following would be a way to go? Just level the one 'extreme' corner and build on this 'half leveled' floor (1-2cm difference on 5m length). The studs would/could?! be adjusted to make the headers of the walls perfectly horizontal also if the base plate is 'sloped' (with 2cm on 5m it would be 0.23° sloped). Two of the 4 walls will carry most of the weight of the ceiling. Any experience with not perfectly flat/horizontal floors? Do you think my described floor could be used as base after leveling the deepest corner? 1-2cm on 5-6m ok? I had to use a laser to be sure it is sloped.

if you can level it using the self-leveling cement that would be best. if not, consider some 19mm soft neoprene under the ripped lumber to absorber to small differences and create the level base then build on that.

Thanks a lot for your tips!! If someone else has any tips or experiences for/on not so perfectly flat floors...please...keep it coming :)

Heck, if you had to use a level to find the slope, and it isn't making you fall when you walk...move past it :) I think Glenn gave the only real way to correct this type of imperfection with a high PSI flooding type concrete..