Concrete Floor Help

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We built a strawbale house a couple years ago and love it. Our floor is just simple concrete (with the heat in the floor). In the summer our house is always very cool and we have no cooling system - we don't need one. However, I would like have any ideas anyone would have on making the floor look really nice. Right now it is sealed with a brick-red paint and polyureathane. I like the color but would like more ideas. Thanks in advance for your time. Pam

-- Pam Harsh (harshhaus@aol.com), April 04, 2001

Answers

about the only thing I know to cover concrete real well, would be tile,, you wont get insulating the heat from that

-- stan (sopal@net-port.com), April 04, 2001.

You can paint a pattern on the floor and make it look like tiles, rugs, whatever. There are several magazines that offer articles on this, as well as tapes put out by Martha Stewart. The results are really great. That way you won't lose you heat sink.

-- Deborah (bearwaoman@Yahoo.com), April 04, 2001.

You could paint on grout lines and stencil some of the "tiles".

-- Peg in NW WI (wildwoodfarms@hushmail.com), April 04, 2001.

This is after the fact for you, but others might find it useful. I saw it in a book about underground homes. Stain (I believe it was just wood stain, not the stain made for concrete) the unfinished concrete floor, letting the stain fill up any pores. Let it dry. Decide if you want it darker or not -- if you want it darker, apply another coat of stain and let it dry. When you have the color you want, cover with several coats of polyurethane.

I got this from one of Stewart Wells' (one of the "old-timers" of underground houses) books. He says the finished floor looks like leather and wears great. He used it in his studio building.

For your already colored and polyurethaned floor, Pam, I agree with the ideas above to make "tiles" on it. Cover with more polyurethane when done, of course. Let us know what you do.

-- Joy F (So.Central Wisconsin) (CatFlunky@excite.com), April 04, 2001.


Here in the Southwest a clay tile called saltillo is poplar. It is a little softer than concrete, but not much. You can refinish this tile and concrete by using a floor sander with abrasive pads that will remove the old finish as well as smoothing everything. Take of about a 1/16". Refinish with stain as described above and then use a concrete sealer. The sealer wears so much better than wood varnish and can easily be touched up in small or large sections (such as traffic pattern areas).

-- Lynn Goltz (lynngoltz@aol.com), April 04, 2001.


Some folks I know used an electric saw with a special blade to cut a (shallow cut) pattern into the floor. When they finished it looked like a tile floor.

-- Jerry (neljer@txcyber.com), April 04, 2001.

Yes, see my answer to the previous post (concrete stain) asking about help with a concrete floor for even more ideas about what crazed lunatics with power saws and more free time than sense can do to a perfectly good concrete floor!

-- Soni (thomkilroy@hotmail.com), April 05, 2001.

When you have a concrete floor with hydronic radiant floor heat, don't ever score, cut, dig, scrape, drill, punch, chisel, or do anything else that would penetrate the surface of the concrete even the least little bit. You could cut into a floater tube. That would be a poly (plastic) tube that floated very near the surface when the concrete was poured.

-- Steve in So Wisc (alpine1@prodigy.net), July 06, 2001.

http://www.fauxlikeapro.com/cgi-local/dcforum/dcboard.cgi? az=list&forum=hit_the_wall&conf=main

http://www.royaldesignstudio.com/index.asp

The first ourl is a faux board that you can ask questions of the experts. The second url is my favortie catalog in the whole world, well non goat that is. Check out their faux brick stencil, it is what I am going to use on the hardy board we have up behind the woodstove. Reading through the catalog you will certainly find something, a boarder would be nice around the room and then tiles or the such inside, perhaps something like a faux slate. Vicki

-- Vicki McGaugh TX (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), July 06, 2001.


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