Re: Innovative stuff
From: Kay Argyle (argylemines.utah.edu)
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 17:53:10 -0600 (MDT)
> Tell us, what are concrete floors like to live with? I have this image of
clammy
> and hard and unpleasant underfoot... (?)  > Vera

Very hard underfoot, and under any other portions of one's anatomy, and
very hard on anything that gets dropped.  One of our neighbors started
having pain in their feet until they switched to shoes with better padding.
 I go barefoot all the time, and one of my first purchases was a foam
floormat for the kitchen.  Several other people have put down carpet
runners in the kitchen.  And I don't sit on the floor as much as I used to;
my bottom goes numb pretty quick from the concrete.

The concrete adds another hard surface for sound to echo off of, which is a
bit of a problem in an open plan house.

My roommate and I decided to pay the extra money for radiant heat partly
because we had both grown up with concrete floors and remember the will
power it took to put that first foot down on the floor on winter mornings. 
With radiant heat the concrete floor is nice and toasty.  (Radiant heat is
also better for people with allergies and asthma, because there is less
dust in the air than with forced-air heat.  And it's quieter.)

The people who have uncolored concrete for the most part dislike its
appearance. (In one house for some reason the unstained but sealed concrete
turned out a lovely dark slate gray.)  The low-income rental units not only
have uncolored, unheated concrete, but the slab for that fourplex was
vandalized just after the concrete was poured -- the contractor managed to
buff out most of the swearwords, but the tracks where somebody rode their
bike around and around are still there.  One tenant's father paid for vinyl
flooring and carpet for her unit, and it makes a huge difference to the way
the place feels.

The colored concrete is really quite pretty.

If your contractor proposes "saw-cuts" in a concrete floor to stop cracks,
insist (absolutely!) that they be filled with grout.   About every three
feet we have a cut about one-quarter inch wide and three-quarters or an
inch deep, dividing the floor into big squares.  Theoretically these were
supposed to catch steer cracks in the concrete  along the bottom of the cut
so they will be less visible.  They don't.  What they do do, is catch
crumbs and dirt and cat hair.  When you try to sweep half of it goes into
every crack you sweep across.  You have to vacuum it out with a hose
attachment.  We came home one day to find a watermelon had split open,
juice all over the floor, half dried, and it was hopeless getting it out of
the cuts; it's astonishing we don't have major problems with insects. 
(When I was describing staining the floor, I forget to mention crawling
around the floor ruining my best screwdriver digging powdered gypsum out of
the sawcuts, and using a shop vac to slurp water out as we mopped.)  

We haven't gotten around to grouting the cuts, and the junk in them is
getting pretty disgusting.

Kay
Wasatch Commons

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