Answers to Your Concrete Floor Questions
We receive heaps of messages about our concrete floors, so here's a compilation of answers to the most frequently asked questions:
1. Yes, they are excellent at hiding dust and general filth!
2. No, we don’t find them cold. However, this is due to the passive design of our home. In winter, the sun comes through our north glazing and warms up the concrete. The concrete then acts as a thermal mass, soaking up the heat radiating back into the room after the sun goes down. When you walk barefoot in our north-facing rooms, it feels like we have slab heating on (we don’t). And because I love a good cheat sheet, we have included all the info on achieving this in your own home in our free Sustainable Build Checklist; download it here.
3. We only have exposed concrete in north-facing rooms; our two south-facing rooms are carpeted to stop the thermal mass from working against us.
4. If you use concrete floors in a poorly orientated home, they will be cold.
5. Our concrete floors have about the same ‘hardness’ as tiles.
6. I have an autoimmune condition that gives me dodgy, painful joints. I have lived in all sorts of homes with all sorts of flooring and have found I must wear good quality supportive ‘house shoes' no matter the flooring (I even own a pair of orthotic Ugg boots!).
7. You can’t cover up your concrete slab if you want to benefit from its thermal mass; for example, if we were to install timber flooring over our slab, the overall passive design of our home would no longer work.
8. Yep, there are cracks in our concrete (see picture of Jedda in front of the Christmas tree below), and they are slightly bigger after the earthquake the other day! If you have concrete, you have cracks; it’s the nature of the material. The cracks don’t worry me (beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?); however, our cracks are minimal because we built on a sandhill.
9. Our concrete floors have proven to be very hardy.
10. They are not for everyone.
11. Our concrete is burnished, which means it was helicoptered longer when poured, and a seal was put on top. This was a significantly cheaper option for us compared to polished, but the seal will require maintenance in the future. We employed experts to undertake this process and to choose the most appropriate products.
UPDATE:
We have just completed the first lot of maintenance on our concrete floors. We knew we would likely get seven to ten years out of the seal when we built, depending on traffic and the general abuse we give it! We have just hit the seven-year mark, and although the only part of the house that required a re-seal was the shower bases, we decided we may as well do the main pod while we were at it (because it’s hard to get tradies when you need em’ these days!). We factored in these costs for future maintenance when we built, and we love our floors, so we are more than happy to do what’s required to look after them. We don’t envisage the kid’s pod needing a reseal for many years.
We chose a matte water-based seal this time (we had satin last time - so let’s hope we love it just as much!), although I’m not sure of the exact product, as we allow the experts to guide us on this.
12. We clean the floor with a huge orange fluffy broom and then mop using a pH-neutral floor cleaner. We also spot vacuum with a special head on our vacuum that is designed not to damage concrete floors.
13. Yes, our bathroom floors are concrete, including the showers. They do require maintenance (we just did a reseal at the seven-year mark), and at the time of building, they required extra engineering and our builder’s wonderful can-do attitude.
14. Our concrete floors are about the same ‘noisiness’ as the tiles we had in our last home. Booken House contains a lot of glass and concrete, so we knew it wouldn’t be a quiet home, and we are not what I would call a quiet family - we love having a house full of people - so we embrace noise! In saying that, it’s quite amazing the difference it made to add soft furnishings and a huge rug to the main living area.
15. Did I mention they hide the mess?
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