Ground floor insulation is required for every wooden house or handcrafted log home. As mentioned earlier in the section about foundations, due to a relative lightness and other qualities of a wooden house, several types of foundations are suitable for its construction. While everything is more or less clear when it comes to a raft foundation with its single concrete slab, strip and pile foundations have their own peculiarities. An unheated space is located under the floors. Without floor insulation, the temperature from the basement will creep into the living quarters. It can be the other way round too: if you store pickled foods and preserves in a basement or a cellar, you don’t want the heat from the living areas getting into the rooms, where the temperature should be much lower to preserve your stores.
There is no fundamental difference between floor insulation technologies used in wooden houses, bathhouses and cottages. It mainly concerns the layer of thermal insulation materials in the area between the floor covering and the subfloor. The thickness of this layer ranges from 50 to 150 mm. It depends on many factors, the main one being the temperature of the external environment in the region where the wooden house is located. It is important to take into account the properties of the insulator. When a house is used in an ordinary way, one way or another there are situations when the moisture content in the flooring increases, be it due to mopping or water spillage, or even roof leaking. Many thermal insulation materials have the ability to absorb moisture. In the absence of an adequate ventilation, moisture can stagnate which will later lead to an unpleasant odour. To protect your house from undesirable consequences, it is necessary to enclose a thermal insulation layer with a vapourproof material, which due to its properties lets the air with its moisture particles pass through. The process of removing excess moisture from the insulation materials of both the floor and the roof requires a small air space, which should have natural ventilation. For this purpose, 15mm laths are used between the top layer of the vapourproof material and the floor covering. Alternatively, you can make the floor insulation slightly smaller than the subfloor sheathing.
The North House company considers all the specifics in the construction of turnkey wooden houses. The experience of our experts and craftsmen, evident in the the construction of your house, will make your life in it comfortable, and you will never experience any troubles associated with small shortcomings and unfinished work.