"Walk the Walk" - Two Step Concrete Coating
Sometimes you have to “Walk the Walk”.
My wife insisted that we redo our living and dining room floors in our Fort Worth, TX, home with a concrete coating – a “microfinish overlay” as we commonly refer to it – because our two dogs had pretty much destroyed the carpet.
After banishing them to the lawn for the duration of the project, my crew dug in to remove all the carpet, trowel down the overlay, spray on the water stain, and finally wrap it all up with an industrial grade concrete sealer.
Most residential projects can be completed within a week and ours was no exception.
As with most things in life, proper preparation is the most important step.
We almost always grind the floors when we’re going to apply a concrete coating (microfinish overlay) to the floor.
This is to remove any contaminant such as paint, varnish, or glue which can become a “bond breaker” that prevents the microfinish overlay material from sticking properly to the concrete.
We then skim on the first coat which sticks tightly to the floor due to the special polymer (glue) that is in it.
After letting it dry, we get close and personal with the floor, hand troweling another layer of this special concrete coating material.
This troweling process, with all its randomness and differences in texture is what gives the floor its unique personality.
Once this second concrete coating dries we pass a scraper over it, smoothing out any ridges.
Next we protect all the walls with plastic to prevent any overspray and apply a stain to the floor. As of late, we’re becoming fans of water staining in lieu of acid staining on overlays for many reasons, the most important of which is predictability.
With a water stain we know exactly what the final color will be as we are mixing pigment in with a stain base. Acid staining, on the other hand, is a reactive process and usually we can only control just how dark it gets, not necessarily what color it ends up with as it kind of “does what it does” and we often end up with pretty varied results.
In our home we applied the water stain, finished it all off with a good grade concrete sealer and voila! – a beautiful floor.
FYI – the dogs still do their thing on it but at least we find it very quickly now and there are no lingering smells!
