Floor

It is almost summer 2019, which means we are going to redo our floor!

How? We don't know yet!

Options

Sudoroom is ~1500sqft. The entire bocce ball court is ~2800sqft.

• epoxy
• tile
• laminate
• linoleum

Epoxy

things to buy

• more nail shoes
• really nice squeegees

prep

• clear area
• vacuum
• scrape gum & shit off
• pressure wash or mop?
  • probably not needed if you're going to grind down to bare concrete anyway!
• let it dry
• grind/mill concrete down to the clean stuff
  • rent professional concrete grinder with dust capture (or wet grinder). Grinding is a TON of work and can get very messy, so invest in good tools.
  • acid etching w/ clean-n-etch stuff?
  • rinsing?
• fill deep gashes w/cement or plaster or epoxy
• box in area with wood
  • only needed for the $$$ self-leveling stuff
• primer - soaks down, bonds with concrete (usually water based)
  • do we need the oil-stop kind? is there oil in our concrete?
• sand broadcast to prep for self-levelling stuff?

final

Types:

• solvent-based: doesn't like humidity, high VOC, unsafe indoors
• water-based: much lower VOC
• solids-based: no VOC, best but more expensive
• are they all 2-part? A+B (resin + hardener)?

Brands:

• Rust-O-Leum EpoxyShield (cheap at home depot, only 2 colors)
  • $137 for a kit covering 500sqft. $411 for all of Sudo?
  • Patrik used this for the small back lab in CCL, and was very satisfied with it. No noticeable odor whatsoever. Goes on like a thick paint, so easy to apply over uneven surfaces using a paint roller (no nail shoes or squeegee needed). Formulated for garage floors, so designed to be able to handle cars driven over it, or solvents spilled.
• Muscle Gloss (very expensive, and more finicky to apply)

Methods:

• 1 base coat w/black paint, 1 top coat w/glitter? I love this video - they are using one of these products but method is probably similar for other brands
  • "normally 4.5 gallons would cover 700sqft of concrete, but sand absorbs it, you'll need 2-3x as much" (so ~9 gallons for sudo)
  • 1lb glitter per gallon of epoxy

Tile

BioCurious covered their old lab space with simple peel&stick vinyl tiles that they managed to get a deal on, at $0.25 per sqft - normally more like $0.40 per sqft. Cheapest at Home Depot is $0.63 per sqft. Adds up to $350-560 to cover all of Sudo.

Pro: doesn't require grinding down to bare concrete, which saves an enormous amount of work. Pressure wash should be plenty.

Con: Some of the tiles at BioCurious got damaged after only 1yr, especially over bumps and dents in the concrete which resulted in local wear on the tiles. Might be because of the dirt cheap tiles they used though. Also, repair is easy: just peel up damaged tile, and stick down another.

Woodish materials

We could do the "softer" half of sudo as wood floor. The "click" flooring is super easy and fast to lay. If we did the half of sudo where the servers are, but excluding the raised server area. That's probably around 700-800 square feet.

"Engineered wood" flooring like this is around $2 to $4 per sqft. Then the underlayment is a bit extra and we'll need some metal panels to make a nice boundary to the rest of the floor which I haven't priced out.

Just the wood will be $1400 to $3200 which is the vast majority of the cost.

• Heritage Mill Vintage Hickory Natural at $3.48 per sqft (3 year "light commercial" warranty)
• Wire Brushed Natural Hickory at $1.98 per sqft (no commercial warranty but same hardness rating as the one above)
• Real Solid Hardwood White Oak at $5.99 per sqft (real hardwood but still click flooring. residential use only)