levelling floor with big holes - Tile Advice

[albert222]

Any advice please . I have a kitchen floor (5mx5m) The kitchen is in the basement of my house ..The floor is concrete . I removed a brick floor from it , the bricks were 4mm thick. The concrete is dry (it has a DPC within it) , but the concrete has many holes in it they are a maximum of 5mm deep ,as a result of taking up the bricks . It is also very dry and powdery I want to lay a new floor in this room without loosing much head room , as the ceiling is low . how can I prepare the floor for vinyl tiles or engineed wood please without loosing the minimum of head room . Many thanks

 

[Mike Mike]

Albert, I am a tiler and I also lay vinyl, homogenous PVC, safety floors, marmoleum, linoleum etc. So this is the way to do it (ASSUMING that the DPC in the screed has not been damaged, otherwise you will need to paint on a liquid DPM after you have followed the steps below and then trowel over it with smoothing compound a second time).

You sand your screed with a rotary floor machine.

Vacuum it.

Prime it with a suitable acrylic primer.

Go round and fill in all the deep / large holes with Smoothing Compound using a lage taping knife.

Wait 30 minutes for it to start to harden. Then trowel over the whole floor with Uzin Smoothing Compound, trowelled 1 - 2mm thick. I use Uzin NC 181
Englund Gruppen

Wait 60 minutes for it to completely dry, then sand over it again with the rotary floor machine. (If any of the deeper holes are not completely dry, you can accelerate drying with a Leister hot air gun).

Your floor is now ready to recieve whatever kind of finished floor covering you want, and your head room will be, at worst, 1mm lower than it was before.

You can rent rotary floor machines but to be honest, if you go onto the Flooring Forum and post up a request for quote to perform what I just described above, someone I am certain will come round and do it for you in half a day for less money (and less hassle) than you renting the machine yourself, buying primer and smoothing compound.

Half a day, that's all it should take.

Good luck!

 

[albert222]

Thank you so much for your advice. I will look for somebody to do this work for me.

If anyone knows anyone that's good at this in central London that would be great.

They'll get the job of laying the finished flooring as well.

Thanks again,
Albert