“Inny / Outy” – Indoor and outdoor concrete countertops
Mistakes happen and sometimes we get called in to help correct them. One morning I got a call from a customer in Godley, TX who asked if we could change the color of a concrete countertop.
It seems that a contractor had poured some outdoor concrete countertops for them and the color was not what they were expecting.
Lo and behold, color was the least of the problems with these outdoor countertops. To make a long story short, the only solution was a complete tearout and repour.
Actually this was a combination of indoor and outdoor concrete countertops. The homeowners had originally intended for everything to be outside but with our Texas weather being what it is they decided to enclose the kitchen area and just leave the grill outside.
It’s an awesome idea, especially when you have huge glass doors that give you a view of the pool.
We kicked off the project with the tearout. Our biggest concern was to minimize damaging the segmented tile backsplash that had been installed.
Concrete is not easy to remove if you are trying to be delicate so we had to break out the diamond cutting tools to make surgical cuts.
It’s a dirty, dusty process, even using a vacuum cleaner to try to keep things in line but it had to be done. The plus was that we didn’t break one tile. Once everything was out we started right up with the mold build.
Outdoor concrete countertops are always a challenge as the stone base they are usually installed on is never perfectly level.
This usually means that we have to make the countertop a little thicker to eliminate any gaps between higher and lower stones. This case was no exception, the countertop got about a quarter inch thicker.
Next we got started on the interior countertop. It had three knockouts (voids), one for the sink, another for the beer cooler, and the third for the cooktop. We finished up the mold build then poured it.
Our homeowner went with a Pebble color for both the indoor and outdoor concrete countertops which works really well with the paint colors and especially with the stone base. We wrapped it all up with a water based sealer that left it with a gorgeous, natural looking matte finish.
