epoxy flooring

The old degraded floors of the new meeting space of a building in Houston were renovated in four days, with solutions combining aesthetics and aesthetic comfort.

To cover old degraded supports in a Texas building, contracting authority, selected two of its poured floor systems.

The specialist in epoxy implementation and decoration solutions for buildings operates from Houston, TX. With a head office located at the gates of Houston, the company thus wishes to get closer to all these partners: specifiers, craftsmen, distributors, suppliers, unions and building and public works institutions, DIY enthusiasts….

Located at the heart of the business district in Houston, this building has four levels over 500 m2 and brings together different spaces. The basement houses a training academy, a training center for business partners, and the workshop, a space dedicated to applications of industrial solutions.

The ground floor invites you to discover the universe of the brand through different spaces. On the first floor, a co-working space for developing projects and a prescription center has been set up. The second floor hosts meeting and sharing spaces, which can accommodate around twenty people.

Inaugurated in late March, the site had started in the summer of 2019. It had to orchestrate himself with all the constraints inherent in the renovation of a building occupied by several other companies previously and in a hyper-urban center.

For reasons of access difficulties in an urban environment, noise pollution, and to reduce the arduousness on site, the old supports have been kept.

A new flexible and very thin epoxy coating

When they started the work, they found that the old supports had been rehabilitated several times. So they had a real floor covering sandwich.

The decision for the meeting room on the second floor was therefore not to deposit the existing one by opting for a very thin system: only 6 mm. Traffic is very dense on the boulevard. It was difficult to install a skip to collect construction site waste.

In addition, the removal of tiles in the city generates a lot of noise. The solution that they chose simpler also reduced the hardship for the companions. It has the advantage of being implemented as a flexible floor, which would be sort of poured.

A two-component polyurethane adhesive was applied to the trowel before installing the rubber underlay and then the resin. This system makes it possible to get rid of a patchwork.

PU resin applied to a rubber underlay

This system includes a polyurethane resin applied to a rubber underlay. Because of the flexibility of the material, it is much more tolerant than a tiled floor or a soft floor laid on a patching. Very elastic, it bridges treated cracks, joints, etc. It can be applied to a very large number of substrates: concrete, screed, wood, etc.

The very poor quality screed was covered with two layers of tiling, also in questionable condition. When you pour a cementitious material on a low resistance support, it can break. This flexible system does not exert shrinkage and tension. It thus compensates for the movements of the old support without exerting constraints on the latter.

This flexible polyurethane system on rubber underlay thus compensates for any movements of the old epoxy support which has been covered.

New flooring in four days

Everything was implemented in situ. The only preparations necessary on the old support were to lay out a trench for the passage of electrical sheaths, then to sand it, and to clean it. Unlike a soft floor, the leveling step is not necessary.

So there are fewer bags to handle. In fact, the weight reported on existing supports is low, according to the market manager of decorative floors. A two-component polyurethane adhesive which has excellent adhesion to all types of material is used to bond the underlay, based on rubber aggregates agglomerated together and packaged in strips. This same product is then applied to the undercoat to seal the pores.

The new ground floor with a waxed concrete effect is also a poured epoxy mortar that does not exert tension on the support.

A finish with a varnish

Then 24 hours later, the self-leveling polyurethane resin is poured. Its pouring is comfortable since the companion is positioned on the rubber underlay. It is much less traumatic for the knees than a screed or a slab when tiling is used, for example.

The last step, 24 hours later, was to finish with a varnish.

The renovation was very quick. And that’s another benefit of this system. Without constraints of geometry of the places, for example for a gymnasium of square shape which does not require cuts, it is possible to treat 1000 m2 in five days. The 60 square meters of prescription space were completed in just a few hours, spread over four days.

Improved acoustic comfort

In this meeting room context, this system has presented another advantage. When people arrive, they move the chairs or can walk with heels.

However, just below the main floor also receives its partners in its coworking space dedicated to projects. It was therefore necessary to avoid the transmission of noise to the lower floor, and to weaken the impacts on the ground to soften the noise pollution.

This comfort has been provided by the rubber epoxy underlay which is also of acoustic interest. As part of this project we opted for a thickness of 4 mm due to existing constraints of the support. But if this performance is desired it can be increased by using a thicker underlay.

It is certainly not very responsible from an ecological point of view to add layers of coating on top of each other without depositing the existing one. But since they had no choice because of the typology of this renovation, they also opted for this solution so that it could be easily deconstructed if necessary.