Login / Register
A solid, hard wearing floor to improve the appearance of a garden centre
Project Overview
The existing base consisted of 600x600mm slabs all in varying repair, uneven and aesthetically unappealing. The garden centre needed a solid, hard wearing floor that also improved the appearance of the building. The floor will not only take a lot of foot traffic but also pallet trucks and trolleys. The process and products used detailed here will ensure the floor will maintain appearance whilst protecting the cement base resulting in a long-lasting substrate. We professionally prepared the floor by the means of vacuum assisted diamond grinding and STR floor scarifying, fully preparing the floor giving it a full mechanical key ready for the coatings. Carried out localised repairs to the high number of cracks using Easi-fil. Three coats of Flortex SG were applied to help seal the floor. Finally, we re-cut all, 174lm of expansion joints to approx. 8-10mm and filled using Jointex XFH. The client was very happy with a clean finish with great attention to detail.
Floor Preparation – Diamond Grinding
Due to the very poor finish of the concrete screed that was laid and the softness of the surface it had to be prepared very thoroughly but most importantly very carefully. We ended up running our grinders over the floor twice using two different process.
The first pass of grinding was with a heavy Terraco 4 head machine to remove 3-4mm off the floor surface to make it even and remove some of the existing bad surface finishing. This process was guaranteed to leave some grinding swirls and marks. The second pass was with a light weight STR machine with 3 smaller grinding wheels to then lightly remove some of the grinding marks from the first pass.
The end result of the grinding was a vastly improved floor finish.
Coating specification – 3 Coats Polycote Flortex SG
The main 3 reasons for coating the floors was as follows:-
- To brighten up the area to ensure their customers have a good experience.
- As the floor was soft it was creating lots of dust so this coat was to stop the surface breaking down and dusting.
- To create an easy-to-clean, totally impervious and hard-wearing finish,
Flortex SG is a non-toxic, two part water-dispersed epoxy floor coating with a high solid content. It will provide a hard-wearing, easy clean surface with a coloured, matt to semi-gloss finish. It cures quickly so can accept traffic in a short space of time.