Scored Concrete Floor

In our Taylor Road house the concrete slab will be the finished floor. Using a structural element as a finish floor cuts the cost of labor and materials. Why add another layer of tile, carpet or other finish? Concrete floors are attractive, livable, and easy to care for. I have seen them in many styles of homes, from craftsman cottages, to haciendas, to farmhouses. Of course, concrete floors may be too rustic for some traditional styles. I can’t imagine them in a Victorian, for example.

We just poured the slab for our current project – the house on Taylor Road. This time we ordered the concrete from Centex, and stayed with our formula of 5 sacks cement per yard and no fly ash. We wanted to avoid a lot of water in the concrete. I am not sure about allowing flyash in the concrete. This is a by product of coal combustion that is mixed with cement to make concrete more durable and easier to work with. It apparently slows down the drying of concrete. I thought that flyash might cause dark swirls in the concrete floor, but am not sure about this.

After the concrete was poured, the contractor burnished the surface to produce a slick finish. The burnishing makes the concrete harder and less porous. This time we decided to score the concrete to control the shrinkage cracking that we had on our Trail of Madrones house. Shrinkage cracks naturally occur in slabs of concrete. Our slab is quite long, and this makes it especially vulnerable to stresses and surface cracking. There is a window of time for scoring to work. If you score the concrete within 24 hours of the pour, shrinkage cracks will form inside the score lines, and not be noticeable. They will not run helter skelter around the floor.

Jim popped the lines on the concrete with a chalk string. The score lines relate to the walls, and are a part of the design of the rooms. “God is in the details,” as they say. (Miles Van der Rohe )
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