Kitchen floor refurb

[Crofter]

We currently have bare floorboard as our kitchen floor. Sounds lovely, but they're softwood from the 1970s, 19mm T&G. Very draughty (suspended floor), prone to damage and ingrained dirt, and full of badly cut hatches made by previous owner. It needs to go!

 

Original plan was to lay hardboard, to hide the gaps between the planks, and then vinyl on top. Hoped this would be cheap and cheerful. But I'm starting to wonder if hardboard under a kitchen floor is a bad idea, and anyway the stuff isn't actually all that cheap. Finished cost would be something like £19/m2 including fitting and wastage (got an old chimney breast to work round).

 

I could upgrade from hardboard to ply, but that's a significant extra cost, taking me up to something like £26/m2.

 

Or I could rip out all the existing T&G boards and lay P5... it's hardly any more expensive than hardboard... and reuse the old boards flooring my loft. Would solve all the problems with old hatches etc, lets me do a really thorough job of insulating under the floor, cost comes to £21/m2 but holy crap that sounds like a lot of work, especially where the existing flooring flies under partition walls. Probably a non starter for that reason alone.

 

At these sorts of prices, vinyl no longer looks like the cheap and easy option. I did the cottage with bamboo at £20/m2 plus adhesive, although that was four years ago and prices will obviously have risen. So maybe I should be looking into laminate or bamboo, perhaps uni-click to avoid the need for adhesive... in which case I think I need underlay? And how are these finishes likely to fair when laid on slightly cupped old floorboards?

 

Just curious to know what other people would do in this situation.

[daiking]

burn it down...

 

failing that replace it all...

 

As a minimum I've had far better results where I've laid a decent board (9mm ply) over the floorboards before using a 14mm engineered wood floor covering. 

[Crofter]

In the interests of keeping to budget...

I'm going to go with just laminate and underlay, but I can knock off any high spots on the floorboards first with the belt sander, and make sure everything's screwed down tight.

Then lay the laminate at right angles to the floorboards, and choose something with nice wide boards.

The floorboards aren't really all that bad for cupping, and I think doing it this way will prevent any chance of uneven ridges showing through to the finished surface.