leveling a subfloor with roofing shingles

[Cheeky]

has anyone ever leveled underlayment with roof shingles? i was reading about this, as i have to do some leveling.

my room peaks towards the left center, and was considering taking up the floor and sistering the joists.

has anyone ever done this with shingles? what's your most effective way of leveling a floor?

[os1kne]

I would say that your solution depends upon how far out of level your floor is, how dramatic the slope is, what type of flooring you are going to use and most importantly how much work you want to do.

If you're going to use hardwood or a laminate floor and you don't have major issues with the floor, I suppose you could use the shingles, but I think a shingle would be a pretty thick shim. I'd prefer peel-and-stick tiles (probably about 50 cents each), you can stack a couple of layers if one layer isn't thick enough and taper them so that your flooring material has full support along its length.

In my case, my house had a fire in it about 35 yrs ago. I am fortunate to have some great neighbors that were able to tell me about what happened. The owner at the time replaced about 8 floor joists under my kitchen himself, and I suspect that he only had a 2' level and it didn't work correctly. There was about a 2" drop off when the repaired section met up with the unaffected section. Last summer, I remodeled our kitchen and decided that fixing the floor was in order. Here's what we did, hopefully this will save you some trouble and you can determine for yourself what you want to do:

I removed the subfloor of the kitchen - this is NOT FUN, use a circular saw with a cheap, but decent carbide-tipped blade (you will chew through flooring nails) to cut the floor into sections that are manageable, bang the sections up from below, pry them up from above.

Use a 4' or longer level to determine high/low spots. (I was lucky, my dad had a piece of heavy angle iron from work that was dead straight and 8' long, this in conjunction with a 4' level made a nice long makeshift level) Also, determine if your floor is also sloping in from the opposite direction. In my case it was, there was a beam beneath where the affected area and unaffected area met. I was able to jack up that beam (in the basement) and place a screw-jack (or whatever those posts are called?) to support. This removed almost 1" of my problem.

I used a power hand planer to shave down the floor joists where needed. I needed to sister a joist where it was considerably lower than the others.

Lay down new subfloor.

In my case, I was replacing the flooring in the room adjacent to the kitchen (dining room) with the same type of laminate flooring that I used in the kitchen, so when I laid the luan down I laid it in both rooms and made sure that I put a large piece of luan down so that the "seam" between the affected and unaffected area was in the middle of the luan, to "blend" any difference that remained. Make sure your luan joints are not directly over the subfloor joints.

You may need to use some of that liquid flooring leveller to help blend things together, you don't want your flooring to be unsupported or it will "bounce".

Sorry about such a long post.
Good luck!

[Cheeky]

I would say that your solution depends upon how far out of level your floor is, how dramatic the slope is, what type of flooring you are going to use and most importantly how much work you want to do.

If you're going to use hardwood or a laminate floor and you don't have major issues with the floor, I suppose you could use the shingles, but I think a shingle would be a pretty thick shim. I'd prefer peel-and-stick tiles (probably about 50 cents each), you can stack a couple of layers if one layer isn't thick enough and taper them so that your flooring material has full support along its length.

In my case, my house had a fire in it about 35 yrs ago. I am fortunate to have some great neighbors that were able to tell me about what happened. The owner at the time replaced about 8 floor joists under my kitchen himself, and I suspect that he only had a 2' level and it didn't work correctly. There was about a 2" drop off when the repaired section met up with the unaffected section. Last summer, I remodeled our kitchen and decided that fixing the floor was in order. Here's what we did, hopefully this will save you some trouble and you can determine for yourself what you want to do:

I removed the subfloor of the kitchen - this is NOT FUN, use a circular saw with a cheap, but decent carbide-tipped blade (you will chew through flooring nails) to cut the floor into sections that are manageable, bang the sections up from below, pry them up from above.

Use a 4' or longer level to determine high/low spots. (I was lucky, my dad had a piece of heavy angle iron from work that was dead straight and 8' long, this in conjunction with a 4' level made a nice long makeshift level) Also, determine if your floor is also sloping in from the opposite direction. In my case it was, there was a beam beneath where the affected area and unaffected area met. I was able to jack up that beam (in the basement) and place a screw-jack (or whatever those posts are called?) to support. This removed almost 1" of my problem.

I used a power hand planer to shave down the floor joists where needed. I needed to sister a joist where it was considerably lower than the others.

Lay down new subfloor.

In my case, I was replacing the flooring in the room adjacent to the kitchen (dining room) with the same type of laminate flooring that I used in the kitchen, so when I laid the luan down I laid it in both rooms and made sure that I put a large piece of luan down so that the "seam" between the affected and unaffected area was in the middle of the luan, to "blend" any difference that remained. Make sure your luan joints are not directly over the subfloor joints.

You may need to use some of that liquid flooring leveller to help blend things together, you don't want your flooring to be unsupported or it will "bounce".

Sorry about such a long post.
Good luck!

great post, and thanks for the consideration.

i guess i'll have to buy a planer. there are 2 sandwiched joists towards the middle of the room, which cause the high spot.

i'm going to put down glueless cork flooring, and it's fairly expensive (fortunately i only need 30sq ft), so i want to make sure the floor is nice and level.

thanks again,
Pete