Here at CDI we spend a lot of time at exhibitions, on the phone, writing emails and going out to site and advising people on how Lewis Deck, along with our other floor systems, should be installed and how to get the best out of them.

However, there is probably nothing better than to get advice out of someone who has just spent the last few weeks/ months building their own property and installing the deck for themselves.

This is just what, self builder, Laurence James has just done, or more accurately, is just completing. Mr James lives in Bath and back in June purchased Lewis Deck to go down on the 1^st floor of his new self build property just outside of the City centre. Laurence had never used Lewis Deck before, in fact, like many self-builders, Laurence had never heard of Lewis Deck prior to seeing the system at an exhibition. After being convinced of its benefits and its suitability for his project, Laurence was happy to go ahead and the deck was delivered to site in June.

The deck was laid on top of timber “eco-joists”, that allowed Laurence to cover the 5m spans within the property and their design allowed for a very quick installation as they are very lightweight.

On top of the joists was laid the 6mm Lewis resilient rubber strips. These were simple to install too as they are self-adhesive and stick to the joists relatively easily. Around the perimeter walls our 20mm Lewis flanking strips were used.  Resilient and flanking strips help with acoustic separation and the flanking strips provide, additionally, the edge expansion joint and fire integrity around the edge of the floor.

The deck, on top of this build up, took just a few days to install, after getting the hang of which way around they go, and after the underfloor heating pipes were installed, the screed was laid in a matter of hours. This gave Laurence the solid floor, with underfloor heating, that he wanted.

We spoke with self builder, Laurence earlier this week and he gave us this feedback:

“The floor system is fantastic. When we were looking to carry out this project, having a solid floor upstairs that included underfloor heating was a must for us. We had never come across Lewis Deck previously but after seeing it, we thought this was the right way to go.”

“As we are doing a lot of the work in the property ourselves, we needed something was easy to install and the system overall was. The eco-joists were light and very simple to put into place and these are great as they allowed us to install all the services in between the webs and keep the floor thickness to a minimum.”

“The Lewis Deck sheets are also light and were straight-forward enough to get up onto the 1^st floor. We followed the instructions that we were given and once we had got to grips with the way the floor is orientated, to lay it was easy to install.”

“We did have a couple of issues at the beginning when trying to secure the first few sheets in place as they seemed to move ever so slightly as we added further sheets, but this seemed to disappear when additional rows were added to the floor.”

“We would also recommend getting specific “steel” cutting blades for cutting the sheets as we used normal metal discs on a grinder and we went through quite a lot before buying steel discs. Once we had these it made the job of cutting the deck much easier”