I'm beginning a kitchen renovation and the first thing I'm looking into is replacing the tile the previous owners had installed. My entire house is hardwood, possibly original (from 1954), aside from my kitchen which was redone as tile. The tile in the kitchen is a good 3/4" taller than hardwood in the adjoining room. I chipped off a small piece of tile to see what I was working with. There seems to be four layers, the subfloor, a layer of tar paper, a fiber backer board and then the tile.
Now the question I have is when I compared the portion of bare subfloor to my hardwood floors in the adjoining room, the hardwood part only seems to be ~1/8" thick!? What kind of Hardwood construction is this? If I wanted to put hardwood in my kitchen how would I go about matching the height with the room next to it?
Please see picture names for description of what they're showing.
Best Answer
What you have appears to be a red oak 2 1/4" strip floor. It will be 3/4" thick. The plywood you see will perhaps be 5/8" thick, and hopefully on a subfloor as well as the red oak. You will need to confirm all this, and can be easily done if you have an unfinished basement. Looking up from the basement on a 1950's era home you should see diagonal subfloor with the nails holding the finished floor poking through. If you see the underside of the oak flooring, then there is no subfloor and the task of replacing the floor gets a lot more dicey since the joists will be the only thing to walk on after the tile and plywood is pulled up. The subfloor should be there, if this was on the second floor, there would certainly be a bigger chance of no subfloor.