So it was time to get our floors in the bathrooms straightened out, literally. After removing the old tile, there were tracks of grout still attached to the concrete. Also, where we removed the old shower pan there was a weird black tar substance and many divets in the concrete.
But most of all, the plumbers had to jackhammer into the slab to move the drains and the patched areas did not exactly match up with the old slab. Things were a mess. In one room we plan to tile, which possibly could have covered up the problems but potentially it could have made tiling much more difficult. But in the other room, we plan to spread epoxy over the concrete as the finished floor, so it needed to be smooth. That means self leveling cement. I have used self leveling cement several times but in much smaller areas. However, this 200 square foot area would require 10 bags of the stuff. That is slightly intimidating. We did a lot of pounding and scraping to do our best to knock down the high spots and remove anything that was not firmly attached. Then we followed the directions for prepping the area. We swept and vacuumed to try to get the dust up (there was a lot!). Then we applied the primer using a paint roller. My online research showed that many people skip this step but I decided to do it because many of those same people had problems with the cement drying to quickly between batches to truly level itself. The primer seals up the concrete to make sure it doesn't suck the moisture out of the fresh self leveling cement. Finally we created dams anywhere we did not want the cement to go. You can see the little box we made of sheetrock scrap in the picture above to keep the cement out of the bathtub hole.
So, 10 bags of cement. If you have ever worked with this product, it goes down as a liquid but starts to set up pretty quickly. I did another bathroom that needed 2 bags and in the time needed to prepare the second bag, the first pour had already started to harden. That means it did not really self level and I had to do a lot of manipulating. I really did not want this to happen here so I got some help from my husband and two kids. We created a sort of assembly line.
Tools: We used three 5 gallon buckets so we could keep things moving. We also needed a measuring cup for the water, a hose to rinse, a squeegee to move the cement around, and a drill with a cement mixing bit. We rented an industrial drill from Home Depot for $20 because mixing this goop is hard on a regular drill. It could be really bad if our batteries died or our drill motor gave our right in the middle of the job. Also, make sure you wear old clothes and shoes, because you will get cement on them.
Speaking of shoes, I got these cool things online in anticipation of doing the floor epoxy later but they did come in handy here. They strap to your shoes and allow you to walk over the pour cement without displacing too much. See the metal spikes on the bottom?
Jobs: We used four people - 1) our youngest was responsible for measuring the water into the clean buckets and for cleaning out the buckets as they got used, 2) our oldest was the mixer, he enjoyed using the large industrial drill, 3) I was the pourer/spreader, and my husband did several things, dumping bags of concrete into the buckets of water, carrying the mixed concrete into the room, carrying used buckets out, sometimes rinsing buckets. Things worked very well. I started at the furthest point and worked my way out, trying to keep a "wet edge." I had to push the cement into corners and around obstacles sometimes to make sure it spread everywhere. Here is a shot of the wet cement. (We waited on installing the final wall between these bathrooms so we could pass between them for this project.)
A couple of shots of the finished product. It is so tempting to leave it as is because the concrete looks like velvet!
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