levelling floorboards with partition walls? Help, advice, information, answers and tips on all types of flooring from laminate and carpet to timber and vinyl

[garywych]

i have a terraced victorian house. the floor boards are pitch pine, about 120 yrs old. the floors either side of the walls that seperate the hallway and the reception rooms is very unlevel. i would like to take the boards up and level the joits. the main problem is that the stud walls? and central collum seem to be sitting directly on the floorboards and there is a joist either side of them. they are not underpinned! i do not want to remove the walls. i was thinking of simply laying a new floor on top? expensive? or to take up ther floor boards and level the joits as directed! ime not quite sure what to do with the joists that the waals are sitting on?
any advice?
regards gary :x

[Gypsy07]

This sounds almost exactly like the upstairs level of my flat. I couldn't believe what I was seeing when I started lifting floorboards and removing rotten lath-and-plaster and found the stud walls were just sitting on the floorboards BETWEEN joists. And not even sitting flat on them, but floating and balanced on a few wooden wedges along the length of the wall.

I think to do any kind of a decent job you're looking at stripping the floors and wall back and securing the wall to joists sp that it isn't sitting on the floorboards. That leaves you free to lift the floors and level up the joists. That's what I did and if you like I can send you photos of how I did it, if that would help.

I personally wouldn't consider laying a new floor on top of the old one. There would be problems with the skirting boards and you'd have to take a slice of the bottoms of the doors so they'd still be able to open into the rooms...

Perhaps another option if you really didn't want to disturb the wall would be to cut through the floorboards along the joists on each side of the wall, so that the wall could remain undisturbed while you lifted the floorboards on either side of it. Then you could level up the joists in each room and lay new floors. You'd have maybe a 5' or 6' strip of old floorboards in each room along the length of the wall, but it maybe wouldn't be all that noticeable once you'd finished.