We are considering insulating the floors in our old brewery house from the 1920s. It has a crawl space foundation. The distance to the ground is quite small, but it would be feasible to insulate it downward. In that case, we would need to remove the old floors. There are old floors, wide planks that lie beneath the foundation, and a wooden floor with not as wide floorboards likely laid sometime in the 1950s. In one room there is a tiled stove, in the other a wood stove. In front of them are stone slabs.
My partner saw on a building permit show that they had insulated a floor with foam and placed chipboard on top of it, followed by the actual floor. We got a bit curious about that method.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of this procedure? It feels like this would be less work but would add some to the floor height. It would probably also be difficult to use the old stones in front of the stoves.
Our idea has been to try to remove the old floors and possibly reuse them if possible in conjunction with insulating the foundation in the usual way, with regular insulation.
Which of these methods would you recommend?
