Living room

We wanted to make this large (42 sqm) room on the second floor into a living room. It was simply a store room for junk when we bought the house. It runs from the front of the house to the back and has six windows arranged on three sides.

The big problem with this room was the floor. You could feel the floor bouncing up and down when people walked on it. Not only that. After going in the room, we’d find dust and grit in the rooms below.

There is a step down from the hallway into the room and we thought we could just lay a wooden floor above the level of the existing tiled one. We were advised, however, that the original floor would still need to be strengthened.

The original plan was to lift the existing floor in its entirity and to relay it with reinforcement bars in the concrete substrate. Then, rather than tiling above, just leave the gap and lay the wood floor at the level of the hallway.

Just before work started, our geometra came with an engineer who suggested an alternative approach: reinforce the floor by adding steel beams to the rooms below. The cost would be less and there would be the additional benefit of strengthening the structure of the house (always a good thing in an earthquake zone). As the beams would be installed in two bedrooms and the lavanderia, we decided to adopt this more cost effective solution.