How NOT to Self Level a Floor! Prepping for hardwood flooring | Building Small Ep. 6

so we are prepping to put in the flooring and we're about to do the leveling compound now so I've got everything out of here now I've gone around and cocked all the seams or any cracks like at the bottom plate here all the way around just to make sure it's not going to try to seep out I've also gone around and done some foam in places where the gaps were larger and I still need to go around and like I'm going to tape off around the oven just so I don't have to take that out same thing with the dishwasher and now I'm using this laser to mark a level line just throughout the house and I'm using this little measuring stick here and I'm going around and checking the different heights in places like here's a is basically the highest point that I've found so I'm just kind of marking where the high spots are where the low spots are there's a really low spot over here in this corner but yeah it makes it really easy to find the high spots and low spots so I mainly just gonna use these as reference marks so I know where to start pouring and kind of work my way from this corner over here because it's the lowest point and kind of work this way because it gets a lot higher over here and just kind of work it around and hopefully we can get it to lay out pretty smooth all right I've got this all primed everything sealed up and I think it's dry enough now for me to start [Music] so this was my first four and it was the first time I've ever used self-leveling compounds I had watched a lot of videos and I thought I was pretty prepared but as I found out this material is really hard to work with it's really sensitive to heat and temperature so if it's really hot outside you have to make sure the bags are sitting in a shaded area you have to make sure you're using cold water and both of those things we didn't do the bags themselves were sitting in the Sun all day so they were hot and the water was not cold and I think the temperature was in the 90s that day so the compound started setting up and became pretty much unworkable before it was able to flow out evenly all right so the first application of the leveling compound is cured and it didn't go very well the first pour we the first two buckets I poured over here they weren't mixed good enough and there was some clumps in them and they it just hardened really quickly and so it just was kind of impossible to work so it kind of that's why you see a lot of this just didn't smooth out properly and it just kind of made the whole thing really stressful but ivory primed this area because I'm going to add some more and I'm still a little low over in that corner so I'm going to bring some more in and just kind of let it smooth out a little bit better but for the most part it is pretty flat especially back in the kitchen area and back into the hallway that all got really nice and level and up around the island that was all good so yeah I'm going to mix some more up and try to get the rest of this area nice and level but it did not level out nicely the levelling compound flowed not like water but like molasses might flow on the coldest day in a hit arctica they created mountains and ridges so vast that I had no other option but to rent an industrial concrete grinding machine and dust collector I would spend the next six hours grinding down hundreds of dollars worth of leveling compound if I had any hope of getting a level floor I would have to come up with an entirely new approach [Music] all right so since the first attempt didn't work out so good I'm back with a new plan I got all this grinded down flat and I bought a 12 foot box screed so it gives me a perfectly straight edge and I've built these rails on either side and this way I can just pull the screed along and it should give me a perfectly flat surface so you can see like over here there's almost three-quarters of an inch gap and pretty flat in the middle and it's kind of the same story all the way along it sits high in the middle and then low towards the edges so yeah I'm going to get this whole section perfectly flat and level and then I will level the rest of the kitchen and stuff off of this so I just need to tape off this gap here and then I'll do the primer and we can go ahead and pour the levelling compound so this method ended up working out really good it was a quite a bit of a cooler day and we made sure to use cool water so the material flowed out really nicely we didn't really have any issues and I made sure to have enough people helping me I had my dad helping me and then I had my brother outside mixing the material that way we could keep working it and spreading it out as we went before things started to harden or anything like that and yeah it went really smoothly if only I had done it this way from the beginning it would have saved me so much time you so to make these rails all I did was rip down some plywood to be the same width as the box screen and then I used some scrap pieces of wood that I hot glued down to the floor to secure them in place and then against the wall we just tacked in a strip with some finishing nails and then once you're done you just pop the pieces of scrap wood off with a hammer comes off pretty easily but the hot glue is strong enough to hold everything in place all right so I've got this side all set up and built out the forms these are the little railings that the screed is gonna slide on it's a little slide on that on this side and over here it'll just ride along this surface that I've poured yesterday since it's already level that's the level I want it to be so then under here I'm using this little aluminum angle as it will track to slide a straight edge across here I can slide all the way down this really isn't gonna need much here but it'll just help me kind of distribute it distributed evenly around here same thing have a little forum rail built a I can run the 12 foot screed all the way across like on the other side and then here in the middle I just had these little aluminum pieces of flat bar so with these I just used some hot glue and I just shim them up to the right height and just built up some hot glue under there until they were good and strong all the way across and then I have another one over there and then I can just put the screed across these and just slide it across so shouldn't it take much over here and the majority is going to be up against the wall over here you can see that it's it's about an inch over there in that corner over to three-quarters over there but it definitely starts to raise up pretty quickly so hopefully it's not going to take too many bags so here's our mixing station over here we just have this little pitcher marked with three quarts and each bag takes two of these six quarts total and we go ahead and fill up three buckets that way I've just to speed it up in the beginning and if you're gonna do this I really recommend getting a actual mixer it's just way easier to use mixes are a lot better and if you do if you're doing a lot of bags it's probably gonna kill your half inch drill motor so and these are great for mixing mortar and all kinds of other stuff so yeah this is gonna be the last pour I've got 12 more bags and I don't think I'm gonna need all of them so it might be returning some but I didn't want to not have enough so for tools I'm just using this little rubber squeegee just to push it around and then I did buy one of these spiked rollers forget which size this is but I'll put a link to it and I don't think you really have to have one of these but it does make it a lot easier to spread and if you have like some seams from you know a poor you did and a fresh pour on top of an older pour it kind of helps just blended them together and so I would go ahead and buy one I think they're like 30 bucks 30 or $40 and I think it's worth it yeah hopefully this will be the last pour we'll be done with this project at least the subfloor and I bought a pair of these spiked shoes but I use them a couple times on the first couple pours but they're kind of hard to wear and slippery and they break and they're hard to work in so I've just been wearing a pair of rubber boots so we have just been wearing a pair of normal rubber boots and they seem to work just fine as long as you weren't quickly and you're only standing in the wet compound then it's not going to be an issue they get out of that yeah if you're gonna be doing more than I don't know three or four bags you're really gonna need someone to be outside mixing that way you just have constant fresh mixed compound that you can pour down because otherwise especially if you're in a hot environment it's gonna cure really quickly and you're gonna be screwed that's what happened to me in the beginning so yeah [Applause] all right so that last four I did I forgot to turn the GoPro on so I didn't get it on film but we poured in here and then into the hallway and it didn't go that great just because the hallway in here took a lot of a lot of bags probably I think it took like five bags just for the hallway so some of it started setting up before it was all ready and then we just kind of got behind and by the time I got in here we were just running behind and I had like a couple buckets just waiting on me to pour and they were kind of already curing so this port was not very awesome and I had to do a ton of work right after it was down with the trowel just trying to get it all flat and smooth and it doesn't look very awesome but if you put the straight edge on it it's pretty straight it's pretty flat so but there was one big hump here in front of the door it just cured on me too fast and I wasn't able to trial it smooth so I had a pretty good probably like an eighth of an inch hump but I bought this dust shroud for a grinder a Dewalt grinder and a diamond disc ahead of time just because i knew i was going to be doing a few touch-ups spots too you know with a grinder to smooth things out but this is the first time i used it and it worked out great there was basically zero dust so i'll put a link to this it's expensive it's like 80 bucks for the shroud so i mean and then the the disc it's like i think it was twenty twenty-five dollars so you know it's like a hundred dollars but if you're gonna be doing any kind of grinding its makes it virtually dust free so and it's actually once you hook the back to it it sucks it to the floor and then it makes it easy to like move it around and it actually helps you kind of level things out because it stays suction to the floor so you know I just went back and forth from from level ground over to level ground over here and just kept working it and it actually leveled it out really well all right so now I'm going to just finish cleaning up remove a few strips of they like this aluminum track and stuff I used I need to pour just a little bit in here and then same thing in here I didn't quite have enough so there's this little eighth of an inch lip here and I just want to fill that in a little better but I think I'm gonna be able to start laying some flooring today so that's exciting so it was nice to finally get around to letting the flooring down and it's pretty easy I used a the same technique that another guy on YouTube uses mister you can do it yourself I'll put a link to his channel he has a lot of great tutorials on laying down solid wood flooring glue down wood flooring and also a lot of really good information on self leveling compound but yeah I went pretty quick I ended up getting it done in about two days and it came out pretty good so for the glue I used Bostic wood grip plus and you can actually get it at Lowe's or at least it was available at my local Lowe's and it's pretty expensive it's $200 for four gallons so it's pretty costly but from everything I've read it's one of the best to use it spreads really easily it's easy to work with and easy to clean up so we decided to spend a little bit extra money here to make it easier and go a little bit smoother and I'll put a link to in the description to all this stuff that I used if you have a project coming up where you're going to need to do some floor leveling I hope this helps you out maybe teaches you a few things not to do and maybe it'll convince you to just hire a professional to do it but I can imagine I still ended up saving a lot of money took a while to get it all done but I think if we paid someone to come in and pour that much leveling compound it would have been extremely expensive so I think we save some money and and what else was I going to do during the kovat lockdown so all right well that's going to be it for this video guys I hope you enjoyed it I hope maybe you've learned something from it and I know I learned a lot and check back in the next video and I'll talk about the wood flooring and what we used and do like kind of a final reveal of how it turned out and got a lot of trim and stuff to do so we will see you in the next video thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Building Small

Views: 160,481

Rating: 4.758225 out of 5

Keywords: fail, self, leveling, compound, diy, wood, flooring, concrete, subfloor, engineered, hardwood, levelquik, home, depot

Id: uS8zLwwBAIc

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020