Level Set® 500 HF Solves Large, Uneven Floor in Texas Car Center Renovation
When Brian Green from Fabulous Floors in Dallas first surveyed the site that was about to be renovated into a large car dealership, he quickly saw that creating a new, completely level floor wasn’t going to be easy.
The location began its life as a restaurant and had been altered many times over the years. An outdoor patio was converted to an indoor space, concrete was added in some areas, and with each new owner came additional layers of flooring. On top of that, the property sat vacant for about seven years after the previous car dealership on the site had closed.
As project manager, Brian and his crew would have to take a pitted, uneven floor that spanned several thousand square feet. Their job was to turn it into a perfectly smooth, high performance floor of showroom and office space suitable for a modern, upscale car dealership. That certainly was no small challenge facing Brian and Shelley Dale, the salesperson for Fabulous Floors who bid the project.
“This floor was pretty bad,” Brian said. “No one knew what to expect.”
Distributor recommends Level Set® 500 HF
They turned to their go-to distributor, Surface Materials and Mike Manderfield, who recommended the Level Set® 500 HF Self-Leveling Underlayment from TEC.
Mike pointed out that the Level Set 500 HF is a high-flow product that allows installers to do a feather edge without requiring a cap at an eighth or three-sixteenths inch edge. In addition, no other product flows faster or provides a smoother surface. Installers can also get up to 20 percent more coverage from adhesives, and no sanding or skim coating is needed. This would save Fabulous Floors a great deal of time on prep work.
“The Level Set 500 is a great high-flow product, and installers really like it once they give it a chance,” Mike said. “Being able to do a feather edge is a real advantage, and it’s one of the best improvements I’ve seen in a long time among self-levelers.”
The project would be completed in about five days over the course of two weeks. Meanwhile, Mike worked with TEC sales rep Kenny Hawkins to provide 400 of the 50lb. bags of Level Set 500 HF needed for the project.
“We liked the Level Set 500 HF because it provides the speed and quality of product that we needed to create a flat surface,” Brian said. “It would allow us to fill in valleys and edges with far less time needed to work it in. This would be really help us when installing soft flooring, such as the luxury vinyl floating plank that we were going to use for about 85 percent of the new floor.”
An ideal high-flow solution for a large open floor
The crew first removed all of the previous layers of flooring before starting the installation process. To get the leveling product on the floor fast, the team used a 55-gallon mixing barrel to mix three bags at a time. The Level Set 500 HF and its high-flow characteristics proved to be the perfect solution for a wide-open area with different depths and height variations. The product is easy to mix and can be poured or pumped for covering even the largest surface areas.
“We had a big floor with several thousand square feet to cover, so we needed the 55-gallon mixer to give us plenty of flow,” Brian said.
Exceptional customer satisfaction
Brian and his Fabulous Floors team were delighted at the results from their first project using the Level Set 500 HF. More important was the reaction from the general contractor and customer.
“No one knew what to expect, but everyone’s jaw dropped once they saw the new floor,” Brian said. “The owners and contractors were amazed. You’d never know what that floor was like when we started. The owners moved in right away with their cars and furniture, and since then it’s held up great with all of the foot traffic. No issues at all, and no ‘poppage’ of any kind, which certainly is good news for a flooring company.”
