C0 · Daytona Beach, Florida
Daytona Beach, floor by floor
A college campus in Daytona Beach, worked one floor at a time, fourth down to first. The record follows the slab underneath, the treatment Florida demands before any plank, and the one line that had to stay true down the length of every corridor.
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Everything connects
The building came to us with the old surface still down and a floor plan that didn't resolve in a single room. Corridors ran the length of each building, and off those corridors were the rooms, the bathrooms and the elevator bays. Every one of them is a place where the run has to terminate cleanly.
What made this a commercial job wasn't the size of it. It was that everything connected. In a house, a mistake stays in the room where you made it. Here a corridor runs past door after door: if the line drifts, it drifts past all of them, and by the far end anyone walking it can see the floor pulling away from the wall.
So before anything came off, we walked the plan and decided where the work would start and which direction it would travel.
- College campus with more than one building, four floors each
- One floor at a time, fourth down to first, then the next building
- Corridors, rooms, bathrooms and elevator bays
C2 · Documented project archive
What the old floor was hiding
The old surface came off first, and what it left behind was the actual job.
A slab that has carried flooring for years is never flat when you uncover it. There is adhesive residue where the old material was bonded, there are patches where something was cut or repaired, and there are low spots you cannot see until you lay a straightedge across them. We patched and we skimmed, room by room.
Then the slab gets treated. Florida is the reason: moisture moves up through a slab whether you can see it or not, and a floor laid over an untreated slab will tell you about it later, usually once the warranty conversation has already started. The coating goes down across the room and is left to set, and no plank touches that floor until it has.
The install went the way we planned it. One floor completely finished, then the next. We started at the fourth and worked down. Fourth floor done with the rooms, next day the third, then the second, then the first, and then we moved to the next building.
I filmed the day we closed the fourth floor. Everybody shows the finished floor; almost nobody shows the slab with the patch still drying on it.
Removal
The old surface comes off, and the slab underneath turns out to be the actual job.
Treating the slab
Patched, skimmed and then coated. The slab is finished before the first plank arrives.
The first row
The first row is set to the line. Everything laid after it answers to that first row.
Floor by floor
One floor completely finished before the next one opened: fourth, then third, then down.
Closing a floor
The floor is finished, the debris goes out, and only then does the next one open.
C4
The line
The decision that mattered most on this job was the line.
The plan called for the floor to run straight through the whole corridor. On a run that long, the seam is the entire job. If the line drifts even slightly at each joint, nobody notices at the start. By the far end it shows as a curve, and once it shows there is no fixing it without pulling the run and starting again.
So we set the line first, and every joint after that answered to it. It stayed straight here. And it stayed straight here. And then the next floor, the next day.
C6
The building after we left it
Look at the long corridor first. That is where the line either held or it didn't. Then the rooms off it, the bathrooms and the elevator bays, because those are the transitions where a commercial floor usually gives itself away.
That is the result: not one photogenic room, but a building you can walk end to end without finding the place where the work changed hands.
The whole point of the line: from here you can read it all the way down.
01 / 05C7
One floor at a time
We finished it the way we started it: one floor at a time, then the next building. If you have a commercial property where the work has to be phased instead of done all at once, that sequence is most of the conversation, and it is worth having before anyone quotes you a price.