Laminate and uneven floor

[Painters10]

I've started laying my tile effect laminate and so far it's gone OK, but I am now next to a rather awkward doorbar and I wondered what other people might do.

Basically we knocked 3 rooms into one and had to screed some floors areas to bring up the levels and flatten them. However the doorway I now need to put flooring up to is right at the end of the screed, and so there is a big level change on the existing door bar.

Here's a picture:

can see only 3 ways to make this look OK, but I'm no floorer so maybe there are other tricks?

1) Cut all floor ends neatly and use (coloured?) silicone to fill the expansion gap? 2) Cut them neatly and have NO expansion gap at this door bar (rest of room has a gap all round) 3) Put a metal door bar in - but I think this will look daft 4) Add a low profile edge strip into an expansion gap 5) Lift up the existing door bar and machine it down

The door bar is currently a piece of hardwood and is firmly anchored under the door frame/architrave. So getting this out to say route out a lip on the rear would be tricky.

For a low profile edge this is the sort of thing I thought of:

[George]

sheet of wood to pack it out level.

Wish I had that problem rather than one sq metre corner of living room being higher than the rest,its just not feasible to lay another SLC down on the floor for one sq metre so I'll have to thin of a way of digging it out?

[stuart noble]

IME drilling a series of holes to a certain depth is better than attacking it with an sds chisel. Tedious, but then it usually chops out neatly with a bolster and club hammer.

[George]

How good realy are those SDS drills at taking a few mm of concrete off the floor? don't have one but willing to buy one if they work well without breaking up the solid lower core.

[stuart noble]

Not very good IME, but it probably depends on the quality of the concrete. Used at an angle, the chisel tends to just bounce across the surface

don't have one but willing to buy one if they work well without

[sm_jamieson]

What you need to do is drill some holes or more effective, use a diamond disk to cut some slots to a certain depth. Once you get an area down to the required depth, you can use the SDS chisel "sideways" to remove the waste, or just a bolster may do. The trick is to use the chisel "sideways" so you do not damage the concrete lower down. You can also use a "point" chisel or the edge of a flat blade to dig into the concrete. Just don't go full blast directly downwards ! Simon.

[sm_jamieson]

Use a "scutch" chisel, like a comb with individual teeth. Its what stone masons and sculpters use to chip away stone. Kind of grinds and chisels the surface at the same time. Simon.

[George]

Anyone see a problem with this method?

Just took up a couple of rows of laminate 2ft away from rising floor area,put down a good bit of cardboard and then layed the underlay down then the laminate planks again.

Its just the right height when it came to the rise area and they went down flat over it so I'm happy with this but don't know whether it'll cause any problems?

[Painters10]

I've sort of come to a similar conclusion. I found the hardwood doorbar not to be straight, and I managed to remove it, and use my router on the back to machine a "lip" to go over the top of the flooring. I then put the doorbar back with packing under one side to level it. Under the flooring I do need to raise the level one side though - I have put down some 3mm hardboard sheet so far, but only on the run up to the door. This makes the floor near level as it slides under the doorbar lip.

This looks good, but I am worried that this will cause a reliability issue with the floor joints, due to the mismatch in height between planks. I wonder if twinwall carboard would be better under the flooring, as it would "give" more.

I have 3mm foam damp-proof underlay over the hardboard, so you can't feel the hardboard when you walk on it.

Painters10