Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Concrete floor leveler?

The home we bought in Craigmont is an older home. The basement is in good shape but the floor is a bit rough. Not terrible. I’m going to build my gun and reloading room down there and want to smooth up the floor in that room. Any thoughts on the best concrete leveler product or just go with neat cement mixed a little thin? I’ve done just about every remodel job except this one. Thoughts and advice are appreciated. The room will be 7’x17’. It won’t take a lot of depth to smooth up the floor.

Have you looked into a concrete grinder? It may depend on how much variation there is on the floor. I rented one to prepare our old concrete garage floor for an epoxy coating.

Several companies make a self-leveling floor patch, we use Ardex at our shop.
Mix to spec and pour it, just be ready for it to run

Lots of products out there for liquid floor leveling. I'd be leery of the neat cement idea for fear of crazed shrinkage cracks.

ARDEX feather finish sounds right.
Are you putting anything over it?
Tiles / VCT / epoxy.......

Look into their K10 / K13 depending on how much fill is needed.

Do not thin regular concrete. Concrete is designed for a specific amount of water to mix with the cement and aggregates. Thinning it will ruin its strength. Use a floor leveler designed for the application. Be sure to put a bond breaker around walls, columns, joists, etc. If the floor is moving now, it's going to keep moving unless you address the underlying issue, which I'll bet is water in some form. e.g. ground water, runoff, leaking pipe, gutter downspout, sprinklers, exterior grading...

Tec self leveler works good. Menards carries it. Make sure to use a primer on the concrete first. Ardex is an excellent patch but it's not a leveler.

Bag of Portland, clean sand, water. Very thin slurry first binding coat, thicker mix for second coat.

Osky

Not an expert on it, but will say, it IS a 2-man (or more) job. The leveler sets up really quick, and if you try to do it yourself, well, there’s just not enough time.

Sounds like you’re putting it on thin, just to smooth out rough spots. Might be a good idea to have an idea of just how “level” your floor is. Reason being, you’ll end up with next to none in one area, and an inch in another (after it levels out) right in front of a door or entry, which creates MORE issues than just having a floor that is a a bit “out of level”.

You can mix your own overlay using portand cement, silica sand and polymer, covers 1/4 inch, strong enough to drive on. Hell of a lot cheaper than bag mix, though I haven't priced it lately.

Kent

Any of that floor leveler stuff works great , just need to prep the floor properly. Do not thin out any mortar mix , sand cement mix etc, as stated above! I always bandage the cracks too!

I would expect some bonding agent in the substrate would be beneficial.

When you do overlay just mix some portland and polymer watery, pour over floor, let sit a few hours and get tacky, then overlay. Used to color/stamp a bunch of that stuff when it was popular.

Kent

Thanks guys. The basement is dry. No movement that I can see. It’s an old floor from 1932. Just want to level up the gun room area so I have a nice surface to work on and roll my chair around. I’ll probably coat it with epoxy.

I've used the prepped leveler and it was easy to use and did a great job on exposed aggregate to smooth it out. Needed way more than I had estimated.

If the floor is stable and sound just cosmetically rough you could just buy some cheap ceramic tiles and mortar them to it.

I had to do the same thing for the same reason at my old house… I used a bag of the cheap floor self leveling stuff from Home Depot, then covered it with snap together vinyl plank flooring. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the strength of the self-leveling compound, so the vinyl planking was worthwhile.

You have to have some thickness, 1/4 to 3/8in, to get any kind of finish, sloshing slurry around won't do chit. That's about 2.5 to 3 lbs of mix per sq ft, If you are buying premix bag of floor leveler at 40 to 60 bucks for 50 lbs, that's more per sq ft than cheap tile and thin set. If you have a large area of sq ft and no experience with leveler, tile is much more DIY friendly. You can stop and go as needed. A 200 to 300 sq ft area is 500 to 1000lbs of material to mix, blend together and keep smooth in a short period of time.

Kent

Done this many times. Home depot caries a product called level quick in bags usually in the flooring section. Spendy $30+/50lb bag compared to concrete but worth it. Dries very level and very hard. Usually use some sika bonding adheasive in the mix. Wire brush the existing slab, sweep then wet mop on a mix of 50% h2o 50% bonding mix pror to applying the leveler.