JourneyNorth: Deconstruction Construction?

Our Family Room is a walk out. I love how this gives us great views of the nature that surrounds our house and it will be easy peasy to let the dog out once we actually move in. This is going to be our main living space so we didn't want to use carpet as our flooring. I hate carpet, especially with having a dog around that likes to shed. All the grime, dirt and who knows what get down in your carpet and you can never NEVER get it out. So gross. We wanted to install the same laminate flooring in that space as the rest of the house instead. This caused a little bit of a dilemma. The living room is a walk out, so it lends itself nicely to a slab on grade type of construction. This is very similar to how a basement is constructed. Slab on grade is pretty much what it sounds like, a slab of concrete poured onto the ground. Construction terms are so technical sometimes. Anyways, laminate shouldn't be installed directly onto concrete. Concrete absorbs moisture which can then be absorbed into the laminate flooring causing swelling, warping, and other damage. So we decided that we should look for alternatives to a concrete floor.

We (The Husband) did some research and discovered that there is a new-ish type of floor construction called a sleeper (or floating) floor. I don't want to get too technical and detailed about it so I am just going to say that it is similar to a concrete slab on grade just without the concrete. You use a styrofoam panel that has steel studs imbedded in it and then you put a plywood subfloor on top that goes on top of you foundation wall but underneath the exterior walls to tie the floor system into the wall system of the house. This did not work for us at all. We had the floor installed for maybe 5 months and the ground settled and there was a lot of flex and bounce in the floor. This wasn't good either, as the laminate wouldn't be able to withstand that abound of flex in the subfloor.

Now what do we do?

Cry. And then cry a bit more. I am not going to lie I am pretty sure some tears were shed that day.

Then we called our concrete guy.

He came and took a look. We didn't know of any way to fix our mistake ( I don't even think that mistake it the right word here. Epic fail, maybe?) and neither did our concrete guy. So what did we do? We had no choice but to rip out the floor out and start over again, with a concrete floor.

To be able to lay our laminate flooring on top of the concrete we are going to use a fancy shmancy type of subfloor. It is a 24 x 24 plywood square that has rubber on the bottom that raises the plywood off of the concrete allowing any moisture that absorbs into the concrete to dry instead of being absorbed into the floor. You can then install your finished flooring on top of the subfloor.

The first step to replacing the floor in the Family Room was to remove the sleeper floor system. We started by ripping out the plywood subfloor. We had to cut out around the whole perimeter of the room and then we had to unscrew all of the subfloor screws and then remove the actual subfloor. We had to take out the styrofoam panels and then remove the poly under the styrofoam. We then had to rake and dig out 2" of sand and gravel from the whole family Room (a 22' x 22' room). That's a lot of sand. Then we started over again. We had re-level and re-tamp the ground, re-lay the poly, re-lay the styrofoam and then lay and tie the rebar.

You can see where we cut out the subfloor here and how much the ground settled.
The part that The Husband is stepping on should be flush with the plywood on the outside,
not 2" lower.