Early floors construction

The next few pages illustrate typical construction details of floors built before the 1930s. The photograph (opposite) shows a typical upper floor from about 1880 and the drawing below it shows a typical joist layout (terraced house) from the same period. The joists run side to side and are supported and joined over an internal loadbearing wall. The use of a loadbearing wall reduces the span of the joists and precludes the need for long deep-section joists which were (and still are) expensive and difficult to obtain.

Where issues of restraint and fire protection were not important, the joists would normally be found spanning the shortest distance across a room. This provided some savings in cost because the joistm depth could be reduced.

In some houses the joist direction was determined by factors other than those given above. Terracedmhouses with large bay windows, for example, sometimes have joists running parallel to them bay. This reflected contemporary construction practice; it was not uncommon to construct the bay, possibly in stone rather than brick, after completion of the brickwork and floors. The joistm direction can be determined quite easily; they always run at right angles to the floorboards.