How to level a concrete floor cheap

hey guys Doug here from unique three-phase now this is not a video about running three-phase motors on single-phase power what we're doing is I had to level some floors to two areas in my shop building that we're not going to use the cars anymore and it has those big doors on the front and someone put the v-shaped when they poured the concrete they made a v-shape in the concrete the tapered from 20 feet in the middle of the building out to the edge so when you pull your car and the snow melts off of it there supposedly runs out the door well we don't need that anymore we're blocked off the doors so I I originally assumed that I was just going to use for love link on you go to Home Depot you buy it bring back you mix it up you pour on the floor and it's magic stuff at levels but what happens I notice the price of it is really expensive I mean it's like the first bag I bought at Home Depot was like $32 a bag then I noticed they had some cheaper they discontinued that brand when I went back and they had $27 bag stuff as it turned out in the end we used 80 pound bags of topping mix they do the whole job and we used I used 29 bags of that stuff so I would have used 46 bags to the 50 pound bag stuff the self love water that comes out to be like $1300 I would have spent thirteen hundred bucks on self leveling stuff plus the primer when we just went ahead and what the sand bags put it on there so what's the big deal you ask well the big deal is to see em mix can't level this stuff out the problem is take a look at that it's just lumpy and it's too thick and when you screed it it won't screed down to you know a half inch or a quarter of an inch or something like that it just pulls it off of the substrate so we end up with a big lumpy mess like we have here and that's about the best you can do we tried mixing more and more water in with the sand mix and on the other side of the garage I did actually put another coat on we thinned it down with like twice or three times of water but then you getting into a hazardous kind of thing where you just got a whole lot of water and the thing you're not supposed to do that so I was stuck at this level and I still had to do a lot of filming and I just didn't want to spend all that money on that self leveling compound although it would seem like it's easy but the problem is when I went on the Home Depot and the lowe's websites and i read the reviews all of them said that it's very very tricky a lot of people are saying they used ice water they use ice cubes they you keep the water in the freezer and those people are they'd use twice as much water in the self-leveling thing and a whole lot of people reported they had major problems to stuff hardened up in the pail and hardened up on the floor it didn't level it didn't go on it got it was too thick so that was kind of scary to me because I'm gonna buy all this stuff and put it on there and I was working alone all the YouTube channels said you got to have people mixing you got to have people pouring and you got to have people spreading so I didn't have that so I was thinking about it then that's when I got the ideas why not just put the sand mix on dry and spread it around and then wet it and so that's what you're gonna see in the video that's the whole thing I did and it worked perfect the floor is all in in this everything is great the only problem I have with the water was I was afraid of squirting the water and get it ruining the sheet rock on the other side of the building there and I was also you can't walk on this stuff it's soft you know so I using that backpack sprayer I aimed the water over there but I didn't want to wreck the sheet rock and I had used that blue masking tape to hold the sheet to hold that plastic on and I knew that was not gonna do well so the next day I came out and all this stuff is hardened everything is great except for it was an area over by both the sheet rock things and that one to work where this it was still powder I mean it's like oh okay you know so what I do is I just made sure I spread it out and made sure it was level and then I read watered it cuz now I could walk on the main thing so I walked over there and I just did it with water the whole thing and trying to avoid is if you pour water on it you're just gonna wash this stuff out the water has to be kind of put on gently but with the backpack sprayer I mean I put on an I think three or four or five gallons of water on the floor itself and you can figure out how many bags of cement you have how much water you need you can say well it's approximately right but it has hardened up and it's hard to all the way through to the bottom and I'm now I'm gonna put this stuff on there and see how that does the dry core this was our first site I did I did a little bit on this I ran out of the top being mixed so I just did that much just to see if this was feasible and it was gonna work and it came out fine him it looks perfect to me I'm so somewhat of a perfectionist and I try and look at every possible thing that could not be right with it and in some ways I wonder if I had a better screed that 2x6 you know it's just wasn't the best thing to be screening with a little bit more sharper with a little bit better knife edge on it or a better edge on it the 2x6 was kind of thick and also with you noticed that I screwed it and it was smooth then I went back with the metal thing and I went over the whole thing again because I liked the looks of it and it seemed to get some of the stuff out but it did leave little as Sams stuff on the top you know there's little sit grains of sand that are not attached into the concrete so I kind of wondered about that I thought maybe if you had a good screed excreted it in there better I don't know about trying to float it I don't know if that would be worth it or help it out a day but it's all fine because we're putting that dry core flooring on there it doesn't matter everything was working fine the whole thing looks really good you can see in this final picture we did the whole shop and finished it up and one good thing was we saved the money we saved we say about a thousand dollars on the leveling stuff right then and then we bought 135 things of the dry core flooring so by using this we saved enough money to buy the dry core flooring so when you really think about it if he used to dry core Florent it's gonna cover up now this picture here this is that's what I tried to do with really reducing down the topping mix with water I mix it in pails I use twice or three times as much water it actually didn't come out that bad it sure reduced the amount of stuff you needed in the final coat but anyway what I was saying was we saved enough by not using the topping mix to self-leveling we you saved enough on not using it's just topped a self-leveling expensive stuff to afford to buy the dry core flooring so now we got the dry core flooring for free really so that worked out well here's a picture of the finished thing

Channel: unique3phase

Views: 88,071

Rating: 4.553648 out of 5

Keywords: concrete levelor, leveling concrete floor, dricore floor, self-leveling concrete, self-leveling floor resurfacer, leveling concrete subfloor

Id: N9gMwzemfBY

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020