How to level a wood floor before installing laminate or linoleum. The easy way.

When finishing flooringsuch as laminate and linoleum, an even rough base is required.

If this condition is not met, the service life of the flooring will be significantly reduced.

The fact is that when laying on a poorly prepared base the laminate begins to creak quite quickly, and the linoleum, during operation, takes the shape of all the irregularities of the subfloor.

Therefore, it is imperative that the floor be leveled before installing these floor coverings on the wood floor.

How to do this in the simplest way, we will consider below.

Hardwood floors are rarely even.

There are usually always elevation differences. From the values ​​of which the choice of the method of leveling the wooden floor depends.

Therefore, the first step is to determine the degree of these differences using a building or laser level.

But before that, to make the indicators more accurate, you need to pierce all the nails fixing the floorboards. This can be done, for example, with a small piece of reinforcement and a hammer.

In our case, the differences were no more than 1 cm, so they can be leveled in a simple way.

We will lay sheets of plywood on top of the subfloor.

We begin the laying process by scraping the protruding corners of the boards with an electric plane.

This allows you to smooth out protruding irregularities and the plywood will not "play".

Important! Before installation, plywood sheets must be acclimatized for at least 24 hours in the room where they will be installed.

We lay plywood on the floor in a checkerboard pattern.

During installation, we leave expansion clearancesbetween sheets 2-4 mm and 5-10 mm from the wall.This allows you to avoid squeaks and swelling during operation.

To fix the plywood to the floorboards with self-tapping screws, we pre-produce countersink.

After complete installation of the floor, the gaps between the plywood sheets and the attachment points of the self-tapping screws are covered with putty on wood. It remains only to lay the finishing floor covering.