Solid Overlay Questions

I’ve got an old fifties pre-fab clapboard and I’ve cut an opening from the lounge to the kitchen and built a pair of french doors for it. Fortunately the floor was laid first so there’s no patching, as I intend to refinish the existing cypress boards in the lounge-room.
I would do the same in the kitchen, but half the floor is an old laundry slab that my old man laid cork over twenty years ago when he changed things around (R.I.P.).
The slab is sticking up about 5mm from the top of the floorboards, there’s masonite up to the slab, and cork stuck directly to the slab and masonite. It hasn’t cracked in twenty years, although there’s a joint directly over the interface, it’s still hair-tight and flush.

I’ve just built a new kitchen, and the floor (and painting the doors) is the last thing to do, and I’d like to put either a nice floater down, or preferably some stick on solid. I want to keep it as thin as possible, so the step down to the cypress is minimal, so I was just going to rip up the old stuff, and re-lay some masonite that I’ve ripped off a bedroom wall here (I’m re-plastering the whole house bit by bit). It has about three layers of wallpaper on it (the old man loved the stuff, but it got dirty pretty quick with his fifty a day habit), but with the rough side up that shouldn’t be a problem. I'll just butt it up against the concrete and it will end up the same level.

The opposite end of the walk through kitchen steps down to the family room, where there’s stained cypress floorboards. I’ve put a double thickness merbau floorboard nosing at the step down, to match my new bench tops. It’s installed dead level, but the kitchen floor behind it isn’t, so I was going to fill it with cornice cement, and sand the high spots to get the floor right before gluing? and nailing the old masonite down at about 100 crs. Then just stick the new floor straight to the slab and masonite, flush with the merbau nosing.

The kitchen was done on a budget, built in place from sheet. No backing or end panels, no adjustable legs, and the kickboards are fixed down so I can’t run the floor under them for expansion. It’s only 2.8 wide from kickboard to kickboard, with an island bench in the middle (there’s cupboards on both opposing walls), so I was going to allow just 4mm clearance (or whatever is the absolute minimum appropriate allowance) and stick some painted MDF on top of the kickboards, tight against he flooring, to overlap the expansion gap by about 2mm (I'll plane a piece down to whatever is required, as thin as possible).
In the lengthwise direction it’s 3.2 long between the nosing and the kickboard of a return cupboard, but I doubt they’ll move in the length so I was going to lay them tight (especially against the nosing).

Anyway, a picture speaks a thousand words;

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y26...chen_floor.jpg http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y26...bau_nosing.jpg http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y26...ortstack-1.jpg

So a few questions for the experts;
Does that sound alright?
How thick is the thinnest solid?
What’s the cheapest, and where do ya get it? (doesn’t have to be merbau, in fact a contrast to it would look nice, but the place is having an overdose of crappy cypress at the moment, so a nice hardwood would be good wood, wooden it?)
What sort of glue, where from, and how much does it cost?
What about gluing down some pre-finished floaters rather than using underlay?

I know some of these questions have been answered before, but I’m thinking that materials and pricing are always changing with the times.

Appreciate any responses. :2tsup:


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