Polished Concrete Flooring - your floors will look great
Polished concrete flooring refer to concrete floors that have been processed with a chemical densifier.
The densifier will fill all the pores and increase the concrete’s density, which will make the surface impermeable to all sorts of liquids. After the chemical treatments, the polished concrete flooring will be ground with very fine grinding tools. Those grinding tools are usually diamond polishing pads and grits of diamond grinding cup wheels. When the concrete reaches at least 800 grit level you can apply paints and dyes in order to improve the visual aspect of the polished concrete flooring. Other designs are available, such as:
- -bands
- -borders
- -grids
- -radial lines
If you are thinking about getting polished concrete flooring, you are in for a series of advantages. The polished concrete flooring is considered a great designed option and the main reason behind that is you don’t have to use any extra material. Most buildings are made out of concrete anyway, all you have to do is make use of what you already have. Polishing the exposed concrete will eliminate the trouble of finding and spending money on new equipment and material. A new floor covering might be expensive and difficult to install, opting for polished concrete flooring will save you a lot of trouble.
Another benefit of the polished concrete flooring is the low-maintenance coefficient. The floors are very easy to clean, as all you need to do is mop with warm water once a week. Also, they are more durable than most of the other flooring options available on the market. They have a high coefficient of friction, which means that you don’t risk slipping when you are walking around your living-room for instance. There are rumours that say that polished concrete flooring reduces lighting necessities, as they have a highly reflective surface. This might be true, still, no official study has been released on the matter.
Polished concrete flooring can be split into two categories: new floors and retrofit floors.
New floors are less costly since they require less work, still there are some things you need to keep in mind before polishing a new concrete floor. First of all, the material should contain a decorative aggregate, stuff such as black basalt or river stone. Second of all, in order to aid the polishing process, the finished concrete surface needs to be of the best quality possible. That’s why is good to plan the polishing as early as possible, so you can be sure that you will have the best concrete surface to be polished.
Retrofit floors might require more deal of work from the builder. They can be done in two ways. You can add a topping slab over an existing slab. For that to work, the topping slab should be at least 50 mm. The other way is simpler, you can cut and sand the existing slab and you can have the natural aggregate as the feature. Both ways will lead to interesting polished concrete flooring.
All in all, polished concrete flooring have many advantages over the other types of flooring available and are a great option for home and office use.