Step 7: Floor covering

So, in this episode, our intrepid studio builder wants to cover his floor in something comfy.

Considerations including:

  • Having made a wonderful wooden drum out of his floor we now need to deaden it.
  • Having a low ceiling there’s a chance the room will make a nice comb filter floor to ceiling, so I need to deaden that too.

The logical choice therefore was carpet to stop reflections in the room with a sound stopping underlay to deaden the floor itself acting as a drum.

I chose to use a commercial grade rubber backed carpet (like you get in shops) on top of a product intended as a wood / laminate underlay, and I’m bloody glad I did.

To be precise, the underlay was part code A300 from customaudiodesigns.co.uk

The combination has worked a charm, there’s virtually no resonance from the wooden floor at all.

So what about the process of putting it down.

Step one was rolling out the underlay:

2013-12-08 14.52.46
Arriba Arriba…
underlay, underlay
…Underlay, Underlay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MAKE SURE you sweep up thoroughly before you start this, bits of grit can perforate the foil. This is more of an issue for laminate floor which doesn’t like damp coming up from below.

As you can see, I rolled the 2 intact stripes, foil side down along each side and then did the mucking about with the bits that needed cutting in the middle. The idea was to lap up the walls and hide this seam behind the skirting.

I used spray carpet adhesive to glue the foil to the floor and stop it moving. Once I’d cut the middle strips of underlay to size and laid them out I then used foil tape to attach it all together. This also worked well and was easy enough to do.

I was pretty damn chuffed with the finish of this layer, so proud in fact that I totally neglected to take a photo. What a twat.

What I also lack photos of are the next steps, putting carpet down is fairly clear, it came in a roll, I rolled it out and used more spray adhesive to fix it to the underlay. I paid special attention to where my office chair was going to go as the wheels on those tend to ruck carpet up.

EDIT: About a year on the carpet is now rucking up under the office chair even after I used a metric s**t-load of glue. I’m wondering whether it’s pulled the underlay up and is causing both to ripple, but without taking my nice floor apart I’ll never know.