Hi There,
We're working on a large new build passive house (bungalow) at the moment. The plan would be to have wooden floors in most areas but we were keen to have polished concrete (or somthing that looked similar) in corridors, kitchen, utility room and maybe bathrooms. We're keen on a light grey very minimally exposed aggregate look like this:
As the house is already coming in way over budget I'm looking for the cheapest way possible to achieve this. The plan was to have the slab, 300mm of EPS insulation on top and then a screed layer. We've decided to skip having underfloor heating as it was hugely expensive so there won't be pipes needed for this in the floor.
My initial thought was to maybe use a screed that could be polish so we could put it everywhere and just polish the bits we want to use. But there does not seem to be many options here and the one or two I found were massively expensive.
I'd looked at other options such as tiles that look like concrete (they don't look great and are quite expensive) and maybe putting in a topper layer that can be polished, but again this was crazy money at €260 per m2.
I'm wondering if it might be possible to use a layer of concrete (maybe some easier flowing version) instead of a screed and just polish this?
As with a lot of other parts of the house we've tried to reduce costs on, I find there's often a way cheaper solution that's close enough to the really expensive option if you look hard enough but I'm struggling here!
Any suggestions would be much appreciated. I asked my architects/builder but they dont have any great solutions.
