Turning a Foundation into Finished Concrete Floors

Concrete Floors
Time: 05:56

Let's talk a little bit about the floors here. This is an 18-inch mat foundation, so this whole thing floats like a boat. This is earthquake country, and it's engineered so that this entire structure will behave as one unit. We talked about that this floor was a challenge to pour because on that particular day, it actually stormed. But once we solved that, I came with all these brass strips, and the purpose of the brass strips was that you always have to put cut lines and control joints in concrete to facilitate areas where the concrete can crack. And you want them to crack where you want them to crack, not where the concrete wants to crack. And when we do that, sometimes what I like to do is I put a decorative brass strip or copper strip right along that line, and what it does is actually disguise the fact that that is where it's going to crack and, yet, it provides a design element much like you would have in brass strips in terrazzo.

Installing the brass stripsThere are some interesting ways to approach this. Sometimes people want to drop the brass in the wet concrete, when it's first here. You drop this brass rail in, and we attach brass screws underneath, and then the concrete can grab those. Now the problem with this is that you have to have strips that are fairly flat and straight, and once you lay them down in people can't trample all over them, right? It's got to be set and level where they don't start to drift down through the slab, and it can't be too hard where you can't push it down. So it's a delicate balance. It has to have some really good timing, and you have to work with the crew really well to put these in at that moment. What they would do is they'd cut a control line with a jointer tool and then allow the slab to cure a little bit, and then just at the right moment, you insert these and let them float right on the top. Then you push them down slightly and keep them flat.

Now in this case here, where we had a storm and you had water and you had bleed water and all this stuff and these things are moving around, it was really, really tough. And in some cases, we actually had places where the brass strips didn't grab anything because there was too much water there. So we had to pull those out and just go ahead and flood that area with a mixture of sand and cement powder to suck up the water and then come back later and cut these in. So some of these in this particular floor are actually done afterward, and some were managed to be put in at the time of the pour.

Decorative inlaysThere are many aspects of a floor, especially a concrete floor, where we have opportunities to manipulate the look. In addition to just grinding the floor, there are textures and there are inlays, just like in countertops. Actually, a lot of what you're seeing here in this house is informed by my experiences of making and working on countertops and taking those opportunities and applying on a bigger scale, really. So in this house, for instance, not only did we inlay brass strips to work with the design of the grid so that you don't have that usual control joint for the cracking, we inlaid large fossils. One of my favorites is an automatic valve body cover for transmissions, and also we put in a few key large precious items, like the ammonite from Russia, which is very large, just as you walk in the entryway.

Radiant in-floor heatingThis slab not only looks good, but it has a radiant floor system that's running through the whole house so it gives it that warmth without which, admittedly, the concrete would be very, very cold. It's always recommended to use a hydronic system through a floor like this because it's not only efficient and it gives off this very, very comfortable radiant heat, and in the summertime, of course, this house is incredibly cool. It's very well insulated and protective against the heat. But during the wintertime, you also want that radiant heat. The concrete can radiate that heat back to you, and it's a very comfortable feel.

From countertops to floors, fireplaces, walls, you can see that anything is possible with concrete. You can start small and dream big.