marking and preparation process, installation (video)

Information on how to construct a wooden floor on logs will always be useful to those who are building or repairing a house. This work can be done with your own hands - it will save a fair amount of possible costs. But this information is useful to those who hired professional workers, as it will help control the progress of the work being done.

Wooden floor laid on logs

This type of wooden flooring is the most common. The method is used both from finishing floors, and during the mounting of bases with the subsequent process of finishing the coating.

Floors on logs consist of the following elements:

• bricks from bricks (not in all cases);
• logs, which are wooden bars with a rectangular cross-section;
• coating of wooden boards or other sheet material (OSB, chipboard, plywood);
• fillet (plinth) - the elements with which the wall and floor covering is fixed.

Usually rough floors consist of unplaned (and unedged) boards, slabs, consisting of pressed wood waste.

The finished wooden floor on the logs is folded using high-quality, sufficiently dried milled boards, with a figured edge, designed to provide a reliable tongue-and-groove joint, with a longitudinal groove to create ventilation. Often, such boards are treated with various decorative and protective compounds during preparation for use (Fig. 1).

Rules for arrangement of wooden floor on the logs

In the process of laying wooden floor on logs, you must follow the rules:

• logs should be set, strictly adhering to the horizontal plane ( bias is permissible only if it is provided by the project);
• it is extremely important to achieve reliable lag stability;
• the moisture level of materials from wood should be no more than 12%;
• it is necessary to ensure reliable and good ventilation of the space under the floor.

In case the wooden floor is installed on the first floor, where the ground itself is the foundation, then the lag is most often laid on bollards, made of 250x250 bricks, fastened with cement mortar. Bricks should be used only ceramic.

The process of marking and preparation

Before starting the laying process, you need to create a markup. You need to understand where to remove or pour the soil in order to maximize the surface on which lags will be placed. It is necessary to achieve the same level of lag horizontally, even taking into account the height of bricks and seams. If bedding is needed, it can be made with the help of incompressible soil, which may consist of fine crushed stone or sand. The layer of powder should not exceed 50 mm.

Before starting the laying process, it is necessary to compact the ground areas directly under the future posts. To this end, on these small plots of land we distribute crushed stone with a layer of about 1.5–2 sizes of the largest plots. Using tamping crushed stone pressed into the ground.

The installation process of the lag

To create a lag that fit the columns, you need a bar with parameters of 5x10 cm. At this time, the gap between the middle of the bars should be left 1 m in size. In case of increasing the intervals between columns increases the cross section of the lag.

If the process of assembling a floor of wood is carried out on a concrete preparation (floor slab), then logs can be placed simply on the surface of the concrete. When logs are laid on a solid base, it becomes permissible to use a bar that has a much smaller section. So it turns out for the reason that in this case the bars will not take on the bending load. Lags are necessary in order to produce a clear alignment and to be able to nail boards. Acceptable parameters of the bars are 40x50 or 50x50.

The size of the gap between the lags is dependent on the thickness of the material of the coating. If we are talking about a milled board, the distance will be 6 dm. If the coating is made of materials such as plywood or OSB, having a thickness of 1.2-1.4 cm, then the gap will be no more than 4 dm. On top of the columns under the logs, the installation of a layer of waterproofing made of roofing material is made.

Installation of all the lags is carried out so that they are located in parallel in a plane constituting a single horizontal.First, we install the extreme lag using the bubble level construction. After that, observing the same height with the help of the water level, we place the lag in the opposite part of the room. Between the extreme lags the line is stretched, as compared to which all the others are put. If necessary, in the process you can put a plate consisting of dry wood. Most often this should be done when the logs are placed on a coating consisting of concrete. Bars are displayed "to zero" during the laying.

Performing a wood floor in lags

After the installation process is completed, you can begin the work on floor mounting. The cutting of the elements of the future floor must be carried out in such a way that the joints at the ends fall on the center of the log. Fastening of sheet materials is made with the help of self-tapping screws with heads in sweat. Draft boards need to be pressed together by hammering two nails into each or each lag. It is necessary to hammer nails towards each other at a slight angle.

If the work on laying the floor of wood is done using milled boards, it is not enough just to press the floor elements to one another. In order for the mount to be sufficiently reliable, you need to use wedges and stops, various lever devices that perform tightening functions. Fixing the boards is also done with nails. And this fastening is carried out so that the nail heads enter 2-3 mm below the surface level. The resulting grooves need to be patched with putty, traces of them will disappear by themselves in the process of painting the floor.

If you wish, instead of the usual nails, long screws can work well for this type of work. The use of these elements in the process of fastening will give a much more durable and reliable result, although it will take more time and effort, since for each screw you will need to drill a hole and countersink the recesses for the heads.

If, according to the plan, the floor will not be painted or will be painted after the completion of the work, but using colorless paint, the fixing process is a little more difficult. Here it is necessary to use open and hidden fasteners. In the case of the open, special nails are used, and the fixings themselves are additional elements of the overall interior design of the room. Nails must be positioned, keeping the same spacing and in such a way as to end up with one straight line.

If we are talking about hidden fasteners, then various variations of fasteners are suitable for use. The caps of the nails (or the heads of the self-tapping screws) can be visually hidden in special recesses, which, after this stage of work is completed, are closed with the help of well-fitted traffic jams made of the same wood. The process of fixing the tongue-and-groove boards can be performed with screws or nails into the grooves on the boards. The option of fastening is possible using clamps made of steel.

Between the ends of the lag and the walls, between the extreme floorboards and the walls, small gaps of 1-1.5 cm in size must be left, which will be closed with the help of baseboards.

These gaps are necessary in order to compensate for changes in the size of wood under the influence of processes of moisture swelling and expansion / contraction under the influence of possible temperature drops.

The process of assembling a wooden floor on logs can hardly be called easy. It is quite complicated, but doable. One person is able to work if he has the necessary skills, information, desire and perseverance. In the case of proper performance of the work you get a beautiful wooden floor, which will reliably last more than one year.