When finishing to fireplace hearths, stone walls and other irregular shaped obstacles with a hard surface floor, the best way to achieve a clean good-looking finish is to under-cut or remove a shallow, narrow section of material from the bottom.
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This is a natural stone fireplace hearth in Show Low, Arizona. The floor to ceiling hearth is designed and built with the stone set horizontally in cement mortar creating a stacked ledge type effect. It is finished with copper around the fire box.
The floor is a solid hardwood, domestic hickory, stained and finished on site using three coats of Fabulon poly-urethane satin floor finish. The wood floor is glued and nailed to a one-quarter inch wood underlayment that was attached to a concrete, radiant heated slab using a trowel applied full-spread cross-linking wood flooring adhesive. The floor was installed after the hearth was built and what makes it unique in terms of finishing the wood floor around the hearth is the pre-planning involved. It would be very difficult to attempt to undercut this type of hearth due to it's extremely irregular profile. This hearth was built so that the bottom layer of stone was set off of the sub-floor the anticipated thickness of the finished flooring. No undercutting was involved, as a matter-of-fact very little of the wood floor had to be cut to fit.