Deep grind and polish offers the perfect answer to a school district's aging flooring. The Blue Valley Unified School District is one of the major school districts in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. The school district is responsible for 35 schools and 5 administrative buildings, thus they are always in a cycle of upkeep and rehab of their facilities to keep them in top-notch form. They are big fans of polished concrete as a low-maintenance flooring system and after years of experience with polished floors, have become very knowledgeable on what a good final surface should look like.
Over the summer of 2019, the school district decided to go on a polishing blitz and hired Musselman & Hall Contractors to polish the floors at three schools (Blue Valley West High School, Cedar Hills Elementary School, and Lakewood Middle School), totaling over 25,000 square feet of concrete floors. The floors were ground to fully expose the aggregates (Class C) and then polished up to a 1500 grit, high gloss finish (Level 4).
The main challenge of the project was a very tight schedule. Floors needed to be finished in time for school to reopen, so we had 3 polishing crews working 80+ hours a week to make sure the deadline was met. Another issue was that some of the buildings had been added onto over the years and there were transitions between different concrete pours that had significantly different elevations at the joints. Through a lot of extra blending and grinding, the Musselman & Hall Decorative Concrete crews were able to create smooth transitions that make it difficult to even spot that there used to be drastically differing concrete surfaces.
In the end, the construction manager for the Blue Valley United School District told us that the floors we produced were the “best finished product” of a polished concrete system that they had ever seen. We were happy to complete the project on schedule for a happy client.
