What an excellent video giving the real life experience of replacing an old concrete floor with a conservation grade floor. Finally, after 80-100 years, the building can work with Mother Nature instead of against it. The exposed brick walls and oak framing are a nice bonus too 👌
Interesting to see your process, and in particular cheers for the comments at the end about alternative material options. We are involved in our own build, a house with downstairs only, raised 80 cm off the ground level, and a large floor surface. Doing the wet placement of hempcrete would seem quite daunting in particular because I don't know of any suppliers of premixed hempcrete here. Perhaps laying dried blocks is the saner option where the work can be spread, though of course you don't achieve the same level of monolithic insulation layer. But no digging, since we are coming up off the ground level with the floor of the house. We want hempcrete in the floor if at all feasible, and to connect it with the hempcrete wall insulation
Wow that sounds like an interesting project to be getting on with! Plain soil is an extremely good insulator and tends to stay at a stable temperature throughout the year so if the house is raised, blocks might be worth a look. Older buildings sometimes have brick floors laid directly onto earth without issue. The main reasons I used limecrete in my place was to allow the floor to breath to reduce damp and to an extent replace the height from the missing concrete. It is also more thermally efficient than a soil floor, however I can certainly see applications where I would simply lay floor bricks onto compacted soil inside the house and it would work just fine.
I have a cement floor (80 square meters) and I would like to convert it to clay floor. Do you think I would get good results doing it on this? Do you have any advice for me? Thank you and I congratulate you on your work.
@@ricardoy.7493 Hi it would depend what sort of property you’d like to put the floor into. If it’s a traditional building made from lime based materials, the building may need to breathe so a natural floor may be more suitable. If it’s a more modern building a concrete floor may be suitable so old concrete could be changed for a more up to date way of laying a concrete floor with a damp proof membrane and insulation. But this would not be breathable and suitable only for more modern buildings. Thanks for watching!
Thanks! Yes the room has a much warmer drier feel and even a softer echo when the room is empty! It’s lost that concrete chill that used to be in the air and the slight smell of dampness from the wall has gone. It seems to hold a stable temperature and is noticeably warmer to the touch than the concrete floor next door.
Hi - I dug the floor out to a depth of around 450mm. The plan was 250mm Leca, 150mm Limecrete slab and 50mm Lime screed. The internal walls didn’t have any real foundations due to the age of the house - the brick wall was built on an oak beam that was in turn supported on flint sitting directly on soil. It was possible to pick carefully around the beam as it was supported in more places than I was excavating. The chimney sits on a shallow brick foundation and was easy to work around. Thanks for watching!
It’s a natural material so will allow moisture to pass through it without any issues. It’s only there to keep the layers separated and tidy when installing the floor so if it eventually rots it won’t cause an issue
Hi the slab supplied from the limecrete company is a mix of nhl and lightweight aggregate / Leca. The top screed coat is just nhl 5 and sharp sand with some fibres mixed in
