Gone are the days of dirt floors and wooden structures for barns. Today’s farmers are upgrading into climate-controlled pole barns that make it much more efficient and ergonomic to maintain equipment and store all their tools. Farmers also understand that a little bit of extra investment in their concrete floors, in the beginning, will add a much nicer work environment, and a finished floor that performs much better than unprotected concrete. For a recent project in Van Wert, Ohio we completed our Polished Concrete Hardwear floor process which offers this added protection.

Our Hardwear Floor process consists of making a single pass with our concrete polisher, 2 applications of our concrete densification process and a finish coat of stain guard. This offers an affordable system that helps protect the concrete and makes it much easier to keep clean.

The other thing we did on this particular project was filled in all the control joints. For those of you who don’t know, control joints are cuts placed in the concrete after it has been poured to control the cracking in concrete.  The joints are placed to be weak points in the concrete so the concrete cracks in these areas instead of randomly throughout the slab. The problem with these control joints is they leave lines in the concrete where dust and debris can collect. The joints also leave weak points where large items like a tractor could break the edge of the joint.  We fixed all these problems by installing a polyurea joint compound. Polyurea is a semi-rigid two-competent material that is installed in the joint to add strength and create a smooth surface profile to the floor.

The joints are filled with a specialty polyurea material. Using this two-component pump parts A & B are mixed at the tip of the nozzle.  This fast setting product only takes about 25 minutes to set up. The joints are overfilled and then shaved smooth for a even surface profile.

Our full polished flooring system makes several mechanical passes with the polisher to achieve the desired sheen. For our economical hard wear floor system only 1 pass is needed on brand new concrete.