It is always nice to get an invitation down to a project that we have supplied our Lewis Deck to and this timber frame self build is a great example. It’s especially nice when we get to visit people and contractors who are using Lewis Deck for the 1st time and this project was just that.

Situated just outside of St. Albans we visited the project on the 1st Wednesday back after the Christmas break. Luckily both the weather and the traffic were fine so there were no issues getting there.

We were asked to visit site as the screed pour was planned for the following day and they wanted to make sure that everything was ok, from our point of view, prior to the screeders arriving.

A quick note on the design of the floor in this type of project. A timber frame structure, in the majority of cases, requires the floor to provide what’s called racking to prevent the building from twisting over the course of the life of it (this isn’t required for other build systems). This means that the floor needs to be secured to the joists below so that the floor can stop this twisting. Now because we generally recommend that Lewis Deck is laid as a floating floor meaning you get much better acoustic figures through the floor there are a couple of ways of creating this racking within the timber framed floor. Firstly is to fix the Lewis Deck down and take the hit with the acoustic performance or the second way, and most popular, is to introduce a timber deck fixed on top of the timber joists with the Lewis Deck then laid loose on top of the timber with the resilient acoustic strips acting as the sandwich filler in between. In this build up you keep all of the benefits Lewis Deck gives you but it is a slightly deeper floor section as you add in the 15mm timber deck (this thickness is specified by the timber frame manufacturer and not by CDI).