Floor and Floor Treatments

Floor And Floor Treatments 3 (1+2)

Lesson :04 NON-RESILIENT: TRADITIONAL FLOORING

Mud Flooring

In a topical country like India mud floors are commonly constructed in villages. They are cheap, hard fairly impervious, easy in construction and easy to maintain. They are best suited to areas where extreme temperature variations exist because they remain warm in winter and cold in summer. The ground floor having its topping consisting of muram or mud is called muram or mud flooring. These are generally used for nonresidential and commercial buildings.

Characteristics:

• They maintain uniform temperature because of good thermal insulation property.
• They are fairly impervious.

Construction technique:

• For mud floor construction 25 cm thick layer of broken rubble or brick bats is spread over the prepared bed.
• It is rammed well to get a consolidated thickness of about 15 cm and above 2-3 cm thick layer of mud is laid.
• No water is used during the process of ramming.
• In order to prevent formation of cracks mixture of moist mud and chopped straw is spread before ramming. This acts as reinforcement.

Maintenance:

• The floor is maintained by giving a wash with cement and cow dung slurry once or twice a week.