floor finishes - best practice

[Justin Marchiel]

We have done many projects where we dont worry about the floor finish thickness (such as carpet). when it comes time to use something like hardwood we start to find some issues. i have made the finish as part of the floor structure (which is a problem when the floor finish changes above the same structure) and done the finish as a seperate floor (or roof so that the finish sits above the level). the problem then becomes that the doors are hosted at the level and not the finish level, so technically our doors are 3/4" short. this hold true for millwork and the like.

How does everyone handle this? if it is going to be hardwood i would like to show it in the sections and such, but as noted above it creates some issues with hosted elements. We are

Thanks

Justin

[sbrown]

The only accurate solution I have found is to make a second level Called Level 1 -FF that is your Finish floor thickness above your top of slab or subfloor level. Then all views are created from this level. This makes your ceilings really x-x AFF your doors also, your furniture. Another option would be do create a level below your Level 1 called Level 1 - Structure, then move it down the thickness of your finish.

I'm pretty sure that doors need to be placed at the finish level not the struct level. because if you truely want a 8'-0" panel it will have to be from there otherwise you'll need to add an undercut to your door and make the door ht 7'-11 1/4" It all gets real messy.

I've allways been curious what really happens in the field for doors and ceilings. If the plans show 8'-0" doors and 9'-0" AFF ceilings but the finish isn't in before the framings so my guess is that the ceiling actually ends up 9'-0" above slab or do they do the math?

[davidcobi]

We do mostly custom homes and our floor finishes can often change during construction so we make two separate floors, the finish floor for each room at 0'-0" and a continuous structural floor at minus 0'-3". 0'-3" is usually the thickest our finish floors will get.

[kreed]

When you add FF levels (or a structure level) are then controling them with Scope Boxes for each area of FF height? What about when you have a number of rooms in a small area with different finish thicknesses?

When they're building in the field doors are set with the framing so they would have to account for any differences in FF height afterwards, right?

[Justin Marchiel]

my experience with field construction they account for the floor finish and adjust the r.o heights to suit (if required). and if you want a 9' ceiling aff, they know that they should place is above finished floor ;-)


having the structural level and the finish level seems like a good idea, but i think that i will jsut offset the structure from that level where needed. the project is not too complicated and i think that i can deal with the finishes without extra levels.

thanks for the help. i will keep it in mind on further projects.

Justin

[greg.mcdowell]

Yeah, contractors are a lot smarter than we sometimes give them credit. We don't have to hold there hands nearly as often as I think we do. No need to overthink this stuff, we're not handing the model off to a machine... well, at least not yet.

[patricks]

We have never done separate structure and finish floor levels that I can recall. We usually show floor finishes on a finish sheet using ceiling objects set to 0'-0". Each floor finish is only 1/8" thick, and it will automatically place in the room when you click, usually no sketching is required.

Ceiling heights are just shown above the floor level, whatever that may be. Contractors figure it out, and I can't ever recall an issue arising with a door height or anything like that. The thickest floor finish I've done is something like a basketball floor, or quarry tile in a commercial kitchen, and in both cases the slab gets depressed at those areas so the transition ends up just about flush with adjacent thin finishes like VCT or ceramic tile.

[sbrown]

See we have finish floors that for sound were 2 layers of 1/2" board layed opposite direction, then 1/2" sound matt, then 3/4" wood flooring. (2 1/4" thick total, so that really makes a diff. especially with door, window, ceilings and crown molds.

[kreed]

sbrown, that's what we ran into as well. Between our acoustic requirements and varying thicknesses of floor finishes that we had to depress the slab up to an inch and a half. Plus in some areas we were dealing with transitioning from 2" thick stone to 3/4" or less engineered wood.

patricks, I like your idea of using cielings, have you run into any problems with scheduling or anything? If you do a master finish legend these "ceilings" would then show up as such, if one were to sort by family type at least? At the moment I can't see that this is too much of an issue, other than if the project goes on hold and a new team takes over, it could lead to confusion.

[patricks]

We don't schedule those actual ceiling components used as floors. We just have a finish schedule tied to rooms that gets filled in manually. Why manually? Because sometimes we have multiple finishes for floors, walls, ceiling in each room.