When we bought our house, we knew it had some previous foundation work done. We knew it wasn’t perfectly level. And we knew that this meant we might run across a couple hiccups during our floor adventure. But what we didn’t know was that hidden under our carpet and padding was a big lump of concrete our flooring guys started calling “The Pitcher’s Mound.”

This is bad news bears when it comes to installing a new floor. You can’t lay down flooring without a level slab, and this beast made our slab anything but level. Plus, there were several other raised patches of concrete here and there throughout the living and dining room. It was basically a whole baseball field but with like fifteen bases.

I’ll start from the beginning though. Just prepping our floors was a 3-day process before we could move onto the fun stuff.

Day One: Our awesome floor team shows up and gets right to work removing tile and carpet. Tile removal is tedious but goes pretty smoothly.

The previously carpeted living room is a different story though. Upon finding the hidden Pitcher’s Mound (seriously, how could we not tell before that it was so bad?!), they try to grind, chisel, and pound it down as much as they can. See that big torn up patch in the middle? That’s what it looked like after they went to town on it.

But like I mentioned before, it wasn’t the only trouble spot. All throughout our living room we had dips to fill and bumps to grind (haha that sounds dirty). See how un-level it is? There’s literally a 1-inch gap between the level bar and the floor in this pic.

Our guys spend all day doing as much as they can to level the floor manually, but there is only so much they could do. It’s time to bring in the float. Float is basically like a thin concrete they spread over the floor to smooth the surface. To give you an idea of how bad our living room was: our original estimate said it would probably take around 12 (25 lb) bags of float. It ended up taking 49!!! That shit cray. Here’s how the place looked after they added float the first day.

Yeah. Still pretty crazy. And here are the tiled areas by the end of day one. All the tile is gone, but there is no time left in the day to add float over there yet.

Day Two: Float float float. Dry dry dry. Float float float. Dry dry dry. Floating is a time consuming process. Here’s how it looked by the end of day two.

Day Three: We need another day of float because things still aren’t level enough. Our guys tell us this is in the top 10 worst floors they’ve ever done in the past 32 years. Wowza! Here’s how it looks after its third and final day of prep.

I never thought I’d appreciate a level slab the way I do right now! Oh beautiful, beautiful slab. So smooth. So level. I’m going to name you Slabby *cuddle cuddle cuddle.*

Other fun stuff got to be prepped for floors too on day three. One really cool thing was that they undercut the fireplace (they literally sawed part of the brick off) so that they floors would flow seamlessly under the brick. It was super dusty and pretty badass.

For the record, the pictures don’t do justice to how dusty it was in there, though you can sort of see it in the background against the windows. I spent most of my time outside avoiding the dust-cloud that was chilling in our house, but I did pop in about a billion times to take pictures of the progress so I got my fair share of dust in the lungs. Seriously, it was crazy. You could taste it. Bleh. But I guess that’s what happens when you buy a house and pretty much immediately turned it into a construction zone!

Next post will cover more on the floors, they are finishing them up right meow! :D