New flooring for the office plus floor leveling & reinforcement

[Daox]

One of the rooms that hasn't been updated in my house is the office/den. It currently has some pretty shoddy carpet that is coming apart and has stains all over it. We will be replacing it with either hardwood or a bamboo floor most likely. Also while redoing the floor, we will be adding provisions to hydronically heat the floor. However, there is much work to be done first.

Last weekend was the first step in the process. The floor is unlevel and I would like to fix this before going ahead with any further work. I could probably use a self leveling compound on the floor, but I really want to make sure that the floor is solid and won't move after doing all the work on top of it. So, the plan was to jack up and level out the floor from the basement. This weekend I grabbed my tools and started smashing out the lathe and plaster ceiling in the basement.

Here is what I started with.








A pry bar and hammer was all that was needed to bring things to this point. However, during the process, I noticed I have a large beam in where I was planning on putting one in.





The beam is 8" square. After talking with my cousin who is a carpenter, he said that the huge beam is most likely sagging and we could probably just replace it with some engineered lumber, and use some joist hangers on the ends to hold the joists to it.





After it was all said and done, I was left with this mess which isn't all cleaned up yet.

[Xringer]

I've just got some tiles for part of my basement floor.
Place N' Go Basement Flooring, also Perfect on Kitchen & Living Room Floors

It's the Free Style type.. Freestyle Flooring - Eco-Friendly Commercial Interlocking Flooring

Not real cheap, but seems to be pretty good stuff for laying down on a sub-floor or right on the cement.



I live close, so I was able to drive down and pick ours up and haul it home. (Heavy)!

[Ryland]

Does the floor have any give to it? my guess is that the sag is pretty solid, that the house for the most part is done moving and that it has just settled that way, if that is the case then I would level it from the top only and not risk jacking the house up as that can crack your walls and push other stuff out of square, but if the floor does have give to it, bounce when you jump on it, then jack it up and make it solid.
my house is 105 years old so stuff has settled over time, so the last floor I leveled out I took a 3" dip out of it by scribing and cutting 2x4's to match the slope/dip, glued and screwed them in place and sistered joists on to the sides to make sure everything was stiff because I was putting tile over top and didn't want it moving ever.

I ended up doing electric in floor heat under that floor and did a shallow mortar bed.

[Daox]

I must have forgotten about this thread. We ended up measuring the sag in the main beam and it was only around 3/8". So, there isn't much sag at all. Thus, we decided to keep it as is.

We've also pretty much decided on going with lamanent bamboo flooring. This works a bit better than hardwood with hydronic heated floors (less material between the pipes and floor top, so faster heat transfer). Its also less expensive, and easier to install.

I have yet to decide what type of hydronic floor to put it, poured concrete or grooved wood. I'm leaning toward grooved wood because I think it would be easier to do and heat up faster as well.

Besides a few things to think about. We're waiting for warmer weather to move the plants out of the sunroom and move the office stuff into that room so we can start ripping things apart.