concrete stain

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We have a concrete floor in our main living area as a thermal mass in a new, passive solar house. The floor contains in-laid wood beams for decor and the concrete is acid-etched/stained to look like natural stone. Although the floor looks nice, it has a 1/8" surface layer of very fragile consistency. It can be scratched off with a fingernail. Solid concrete lies below. Our builder is recommending scraping off the surface layer (with wire brushes) and applying a concrete stain of uniform color. We are not excited about the process, in particular texture of finished surface and monotony of stain in our main living area. Any suggestions would be welcome! Thanks.

-- Keith (hak@lilly.com), April 02, 2001

Answers

Keith: If you want to keep the finish you have maybe apply 1 coat of clear satin polyurathane spar varnish in a small test spot to see if you like it. It should bond the first layer making it smoother and give it a bit of a honey tint. I'm afraid if you scrape the top layer off and stain it will be like walking on sandpaper! Another thing is you might use the beams as nailers and lay a wood floor down? Test a bunch of ideas before letting a contracter work on a concrete foor!!...Kirk

-- Kirk Davis (kirkay@yahoo.com), April 02, 2001.

A floor sander with abrasive pads will work fine to take off the top layer and leave everything smooth and level (depending on the operator's skill level).

-- Lynn Goltz (lynngoltz@aol.com), April 02, 2001.

Why not use more than one color of stain??? Seems that if the surface layer is that fragile, you should probably remove it. Of course, the builder could have recommended that based on the idea of getting more money.

Personally, I think it would look great with the inlay one color, and perhaps the concrete another??? Depends on how much work you want to do..... You will have to seal the wood parts anyway.....

-- Sue Diederich (willow666@rocketmail.com), April 02, 2001.


I have seen exquisitely beautiful concrete floors! Some were faux painted to look like marble, and then coated with a few coats of wax. Tres elegante! Concrete coloration can be manipulated much the same way paint can be, and I am actually planning on concrete floors as a first choice(with heating coils under them, if I can ever afford it!)

Check it out!

-- sheepish (WA) (the_original_sheepish@hotmail.com), April 02, 2001.


Sounds like whoever finished the floor was incompetent. You get that effect if the surface is overworked, so that the sand and aggregate goes down and only the cement powder and water is left at the surface. Don't know if knowing that helps at all, although it might give you a basis for a legal case. It might also give you a basis for talking to the floor finisher, and getting them to fix the problem. Maybe you can get them to spring for wire-brushing the floor and putting on a polyurethane finish (I wouldn't count on anything being reliably able to soak the crumbly surface all through, then find and adhere to solid concrete underneath).

On second thoughts, how much of the floor surface is concrete and how much boards? If the boards are the majority of the surface, laid like bricks or tiles, maybe the mortar could be raked out to a depth of an inch or so, and then re-laid.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), April 02, 2001.



Get a small circular saw (I'm thinking cabinet saw sized, or a little bigger) and fit it with a fiber blade or diamond tip. You can then score your concrete into tile-sized squares, brick-like herringbones (oy, my aching back!) or flagstone-like chunks. If you have the time, inclination, and weirdness, you could even score in patterns (like a stylized sun and stars, hopscotch, football field, or even Nike Swoosh). Whatever. For tile-style patterns, you can run a masking liquid over the "grout" lines, color and pattern your "tile" as desired, then pull up the mask and stain the "grout" to look natural. With the farther-out stuff, the same technique could give you a gold leafed star and sun on a night-blue field (no shit, it can be done, and not to $$$, either - just don't forget to seal the heck out of the leafing) or a green football field with white lines and even a true-color team emblem painted smack dab in the center.

Heck, give me the time, equipment, and some serious cash, and I could chisel you a driveway that (when tediously handpainted and SEALED to within an inch of its life) would look like a river of assorted gumdrops! Why? Who knows, but it gives you an idea of what life looks like when you're living WAAAYYY outside the box!

-- Soni (thomkilroy@hotmail.com), April 05, 2001.


Acid etched?! Why didn't they just stamp it with those patterned dies like they do for fancy parking lots, pool decks, etc.? Just curious.

If the surface is that fragile it sounds like somebody, somewhere, messed up big time. Is the builder offering to scrape it off with wire brushes on your nickel or his? You could have it scraped off and resurfaced. Basically, they float a thin layer of concrete over the area and stain, stamp, whatever the new surface.

Of course, if they overwork the new concrete, you'll have the same problem as you do now.

-- dmtaylor (dmtaylor@fanninelectic.com), April 08, 2001.


I don't think you said this was a concrete floor with hydronic radiant floor heat. But, just in case, don't ever score, cut, dig, scrape, drill, punch, chisel, or do anything else that would penetrate the surface of the concrete even the least little bit. You could cut into a floater tube. That would be a poly (plastic) tube that floated very near the surface when the concrete was poured.

-- Steve in So. Wisc (alpine1@prodigy.net), July 06, 2001.

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