Stained Concrete Patio
Summertime – there was never a better time to highlight this Double Oak, TX concrete patio with an acid stain, scoring, and sealing.
Whenever we do an acid stain, we always place color samples for our customers approval prior to staining and our homeowner could not decide which one she liked best for her stained concrete patio project – the umber or the black acid stain. We decided to give her both!
There are several ways to do this. You can combine both stains together to make a third color, or you can spray one color down as a base followed by the other as a highlight or you can a more complicated technique, spraying two colors at the same time.
It’s more complicated, you need one guy holding the tanks while the other one has the spray wands but it produces gorgeous results. We moved the spray wands in random patterns, in some places one or the other color would predominate and at the same time wherever the two sprays would come together it would create a new composite color.
These beautiful acid stain colors are always enhanced with a nice score pattern. This was a 24” tile pattern cut using a diamond saw blade that lasts a lot longer cutting concrete than traditional abrasive types of blades. We usually mount this blade into a shrouded circular saw that helps trap dust in the cutting process.
The shroud covers around 90% of the blade and an attachment for a hose from a shop vac. We use the saw for the majority of our long cuts then come back with a handheld 4” grinder with a smaller diamond blade for touchups-one guys cutting and the other holding a vacuum cleaner hose right next to it.
We always do touchups, no concrete floor is perfectly flat and the saw’s height can’t be changed on the fly. Sure, we could just make deeper cuts, but as any homeowner with tile knows, deep grooves in the floor accumulate dirt. We avoid this by making light, shallow cuts (no more than 1/8” on average) and wherever the concrete dips we come back with the handheld grinder to finish it off.
A big advantage diamond blades have is that they make smooth cuts and last very long compared to abrasive style blades. Imagine starting at one end of a cut and watching the score line disappear as you went along because the blade had worn away.
To wrap things up we sprayed a solvent based concrete sealer over the entire stained concrete patio, making the acid stain colors “pop”. It was a truly beautiful result.
