Our Floor

The floor of any dance studio is really the most important element, and also the part that parents of young students will think about the least. When I first started thinking about opening The Dance Barn, the floor was one of the first things I researched. When we leased the space we're in, which is built on a concrete slab, I knew I was going to have to install a "sprung" floor.

Dancing on a sprung floor is heaven. Although you wouldn't notice the difference just walking on it (unless you were looking for it), when you jump on a non-sprung floor you can feel the impact of the jump in ALL your joints (more so the older I get). On a sprung floor the floor itself takes some of that impact, and it not only feels better on your body, it actually makes a huge difference physically, especially over a long period of time.

One year in college, I was performing in the Nutcracker, two shows a day for about a week on a non-sprung floor. Every day I had to come home and ice my knees and ankles because they hurt so bad. My body just ached for the entire run of the show, and I was only 19 years old.

Anyway, I digress. So the first big project we undertook for the studio was installing our sprung floor. In an effort to save money, we did all the work ourselves (with the generous help of friends). The first step of this involved gluing 2,500 2" foam cubes to the back of sheets of plywood. Here I am putting Liquid Nails on the wood:

Just look at that technique, I think I'm a natural. Although the backseat gluer standing next to me seems to think I need some guidance. Ahem. Moving on. The gluing took about half the day. Next we lay all the sheets of plywood out in the studio with the foam blocks underneath. We used 1/2" plywood, and it was hard to believe it was going to make a solid floor because it was warped and creaking (this was perfectly normal). This photo is a low-profile angle of the resilient squishy goodness that is underneath our floor:


After we got all of the foam blocked plywood laid out, we put down another layer of plywood. We overlapped all the seams, and used Liquid Nails and a divergent stapler to tack the two layers together. This is an action shot of our friend and his mad stapling skillz:


Of course, this being a family friendly dance studio, all our kids were with us for the entire day. They ran around and played a lot, naturally, but we also believe that children should contribute to the effort. I mean, what's the point of having kids if we can't put them to work, right? So they brought us piles of foam blocks, and looked out for the younger kids, oh, and took over using the power tools when the adults got tired:


And at the end of that long (12 hour) day, we had ourselves a 28'x28' sprung dance floor. Ta da!


Now, the 28'x28' is the sprung part, but the studio room is a bit bigger than that. So the next week I spent building up the rest of the floor to meet the sprung part (which is 3" off the ground). I also had to build up the floor of the bathroom that's in the studio. All in all, the room is 29'x34' minus the bathroom, which feels wonderfully huge and decadent, especially after the 16'x24' dance floor in the original dance barn.

Doesn't that make you want to dance? Or is it just me?