How Thick Should A Basement Floor Be

This home will have poured basement walls over the footings so the basement slab isn t bearing the weight of the house walls.

How thick should a basement floor be.

Measure the width of the basement and then the length. You will need enough sand to cover the floor in a layer that is. How to read floor beam span tables page includes a span calculator. The average thickness for a basement floor should be 4.

For joist spacing of more than 16 inches up to 19 2 inches on center the minimum thickness for both plywood and osb is 3 4 inch. If you have any load bearing walls columns or a chimney these areas should have footings already in place before the floor is poured. In a typical home the entire structure between levels can be about 12 to 14 inches thick depending on the type of joists used and the finish materials for the floor and ceiling. Learning how to design with them becomes straight forward with a few pointers.

If not then thicken those areas to whatever the code is in your area and pour them along with the floor add a mat of rebar in the load bearing areas for. Basement floors are supposed to be 3 4 inches thick but as previous poster said it probably started out being dirt and someone upgraded to 3 4 inch. For joists spaced more than 19 2 inches on center the minimum thickness for plywood is 7 8 inch and for osb 1 inch. Concrete slab on ground floors shall be a minimum 3 5 inches thick.

3 of concrete is more than enough for a slab that is only a finished floor and not a load bearing member particularly with that excessive amount of steel reinforcement typically it s either rebar or mesh but not both. Wood framing tables can contain a lot of information in one table. Learn how with this residential structural design tutorial. A standard floor is a minimum of 4 thick but with a good base you could get away with 2 5 3 but i would probably go 3.