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Stained concrete
Adding style by staining concrete
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Concrete Staining by Polished Concrete Little Rock
Note: This is an excerpt from a recent podcast by Surface Renew... Bob: Good morning, it's Bob and Ryan with surface renew. And this morning we wanted to revisit a topic that we love concrete staining Little Rock, AR, and we love it because it's kind of misleading when you say staining, because really that's not what we're doing. When you think of traditional concrete staining Little Rock, AR, which is putting color on, and then rolling a sealer on top of it. What do we do differently, Ryan? That makes us stand out. |
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Ryan:
We actually make it more permanent. Whatever you, we, we, we diamond Polish the concrete, which with our process to break down of it. Well, the incorrect way, the old school way of it is they'll clean a slab. They'll add color to it, whether it be acid stain or acetone, stain dye, and then they just roll a sealer over it. And that sealer tends to walk off. It's a sacrificial code and we talk about sacrificial coatings all the time, like wax or, or sealer, but it walks off with heavy traffic due to the fact that the bottom of your shoes are like 80 to 400 grit sandpaper. It will just remove the surface of that. Yeah.
Bob:
But doesn't it look so great and shiny when it first gets done though, with that.
Ryan:
Oh yeah, that looks good for the first month. If that, you know, it depends on traffic, but then after what we do is we come in and you'll see it mostly, you can, you can really tell how long it lasts because all the big box stores are doing this process now because their floors last a hundred times longer is after the concrete is poured. We'll come in, we'll clean the slab real well, work it up to about a 200 grit, diamond. We applied color. We densify makes the concrete even harder and helps lock the color in. Then we run it up to 800 grade or 1500 grit, whatever your optimal shine is, the customer wants. And then we apply. I hate to use the word sealer, but it is a type of sealer if you will. But it's a penetrating topical sealer that we wrote that we mop on with a, a microfiber my profile, my microfiber mop. And then we burnish it. And with the burnishing processes, it actually heats up the sealer and pushes it down into the concrete. So it's not on top and it doesn't walk off and leaving you with a, with a color. What's your cause. Once the sealer walks off, your color walks off from behind it, that does not happen with polished concrete Little Rock, AR.
Bob:
And the polished concrete Little Rock we're actually making that surface, the actual surface of the concrete, your finished floor. So it's your hard, shiny surface. And like Ryan said, we densified and densification is this process where it's chemical process that takes place in the very upper surface of the concrete. That actually makes that top of the concrete more spill resistant, stain resistant and makes it more resistant to scratching as well. What kind of places do you think that this would be appropriate for at all? For our standpoint, we can say everywhere, but what are some great places that you think we've done?
Ryan:
Restaurants, storefronts storage units, re homes, businesses, office show rooms, we've done mechanical shops. We've done car show areas just about anywhere. The only place that I wouldn't recommend, it is in a kitchen setting in a restaurant because of the slip prevention, you want to do an anti-slip floor in the kitchen, but anywhere else in a restaurant, the front serving areas, great restrooms are great. We did a walkway around a gymnasium. Anything that's interior, it has to be, it really needs to be an interior concrete for us to Polish.
Bob:
And the great thing about the polishing process is, again, it's the low maintenance. It keeps looking when we're done. It keeps looking that way with minimal effort for several years, depending on foot traffic. When we have a customer that is a highly foot traffic commercial area, we'll recommend semi-annual or maybe annual maintenance on there where we come in, just touched up a little bit, maybe apply another coat of sealer on there to make sure that topcoat is sealed real good, but I can, I can give a great example of one though, that was done about five years ago, a school we did, and they have not done anything for maintenance on there other than a dust mop and wet mop their floors. And they are still happy as can be with them. They actually had us go all the way to Bentonville and doing another school for them because it turned out so well. Yep.
Ryan:
Those, and that's talking about a school, that's a super high traffic. There's just nonstop traffic in it nine months out of the year. Yep.
Bob:
Now that we can do more than just add some color to concrete, though. Somebody's looking for more personalization or customization. What are some little tips and tricks we have or add ons that we can do to kind of make a floor really stand out? Yeah.
Ryan:
Like in a business setting, which we're talking about doing in our own showroom is a, we can do stencil work where we can add a logo or a name or some lettering into the concrete. And then we Polish that color into the concrete as well. And we also do engraving etching. We can do soft cut lines. We can do a lot of different things to make it more of a decorative polished concrete as well. Yeah.
Bob:
So when you do your concrete staining Little Rock, AR, you're adding kind of your personal touch to your floor. And as you know, people, that's what they see when they come into your home or business is, I mean, everybody, whether you realize it or not, you look at the floor, we didn't realize how much until we started in this business. And then again, when you start realizing that man, every time I walk in someplace, I am assessing a floor and it's not because now we are in this business. It's just because that's just what you do when you walk into a place it's one of your first impressions is, you know, how well is it lit? What's the floor look
Ryan:
Well, clean is some nice floor and shiny equals clean. That's one of the big customers of polished concrete is Walmart and Walmart's philosophy is shiny, is clean and really the biggest, the biggest business in the States or world. Really the biggest, I mean, I think they got something going, right, exactly. I mean, when you look
Bob:
At places like a target or a Walmart, your, your big box stores, every little penny, they spend matters because they have so many stores and you go into those stores, you do not see VCT tiles anymore. And there's a very simple reason why you don't VCT tiles are cheap. They're inexpensive, they're quick to put in, but you lose that money on the maintenance side because they cost a lot to maintain a years ago when I was in college, I was in the grocery business and we did not have concrete staining Little Rock, AR back then. So the VCT tiles in our grocery store, I know at least twice, if not three times a week, a company came in at night when the store was closed and would have to completely strip and wax the entire floor because there's so much traffic through there and worse yet when a VC tile broke or cracked, there was absolutely no hope of finding an exact matching VCT tile. So I'm sure you've seen that in stores, too, Ryan, where you walk in and someone's got this little spot that's been fixed and it's obvious it's been fixed because there's different colors.
Ryan:
No, that's also with any tile, porcelain tile or any tile that you put down, you're not going to find a matching from that lot unless you bought a whole pallet just to keep your floor going. There's no money in that. Or with polished concrete, the maintenance on that yearly maintenance on say like my house or, or a storefront that we've done it's we can come back. Usually we average between three and $4 a square foot for our initial start to end process. Well, in a year or two, we can come back in for under a dollar. It usually in the 80 cent range, we can come in and do a maintenance on that floor. Well, we may hit it with a high grit diamond, or a lot of times we just clean it with a black scrubby pad with one of our machines, and then we seal it and clean it and burnish it again.
Bob:
And what that does, it kind of tunes up that very top part of the concrete, like we've been talking about. So I'm going to do the concrete staining Little Rock, AR. You have got that color presiding sort of in the top of the concrete. And we're just making sure that that part of the concrete doesn't get wore out and color starts to walk off. Like you see on so many where guys have done concrete staining Little Rock, AR and they've gone and done the color and the roll sealer like Ryan was talking about her.
Ryan:
Everybody's been in the restaurant where you walk in and to the left and the right of you, you see dark Brown or dark red or something in the middle. It's just gray, concrete from all the high traffic and the greasy footprints.
Bob:
It was great color along the walls
Ryan:
In the middle. Nobody walks the edges of the room, but in the high traffic, we call it the field of the floor in the middle of the field. It's always gone where within polished concrete, it stays uniform as long as it's maintenance once a year or every couple of years and concrete that you keep an area, you keep a a field that maintain the same optimal field throughout the whole slab.
Bob:
And the number of concrete stain colors we have available is just absolutely amazing. We've got a, well, we've got a book that we usually take our sales calls, which is just about any color you could possibly want, but we have other colors available as well too. Oh yeah.
Ryan:
And we can do, we can do model colors where we like do a red and a black mixed together to where you get real high and lows. Cause your concrete slabs going to give you high and lows and the colors. Anyway, it's not going to be a solid color, like a solid Brown or a solid red or a solid gray. You're going to have light gray, dark gray, you know, throughout the slab. But to make that even more rustic or just more marbled, look, we can add two different colors, three different colors into the slab, and then we Polish it. It makes it popped up and gives it a marbling effect.
Bob:
Yeah. In, in concrete staining Little Rock, AR, what causes that is, even though your concrete is all say out front in best case scenario, all from one poor you know, the concrete in different areas of the slab is going to set up differently as the guys who use their trowels over the top of it, it's going to cause it to shift differently, more cream rise to the top in one spot. So
Ryan:
With the trowels, it's called burnishing. When you get the dark, dark, dark gray spots where the trowel machine is actually burned the top of the slab,
Bob:
Which actually love because we think it adds such great character to our floors. That color kind of gets in there and adds little, extra depth to your floor. If you will. Anything else on our concrete staining Little Rock, AR for a surface renew?
Ryan:
Not until next week when we discuss concrete polishing or marble polishing.
We actually make it more permanent. Whatever you, we, we, we diamond Polish the concrete, which with our process to break down of it. Well, the incorrect way, the old school way of it is they'll clean a slab. They'll add color to it, whether it be acid stain or acetone, stain dye, and then they just roll a sealer over it. And that sealer tends to walk off. It's a sacrificial code and we talk about sacrificial coatings all the time, like wax or, or sealer, but it walks off with heavy traffic due to the fact that the bottom of your shoes are like 80 to 400 grit sandpaper. It will just remove the surface of that. Yeah.
Bob:
But doesn't it look so great and shiny when it first gets done though, with that.
Ryan:
Oh yeah, that looks good for the first month. If that, you know, it depends on traffic, but then after what we do is we come in and you'll see it mostly, you can, you can really tell how long it lasts because all the big box stores are doing this process now because their floors last a hundred times longer is after the concrete is poured. We'll come in, we'll clean the slab real well, work it up to about a 200 grit, diamond. We applied color. We densify makes the concrete even harder and helps lock the color in. Then we run it up to 800 grade or 1500 grit, whatever your optimal shine is, the customer wants. And then we apply. I hate to use the word sealer, but it is a type of sealer if you will. But it's a penetrating topical sealer that we wrote that we mop on with a, a microfiber my profile, my microfiber mop. And then we burnish it. And with the burnishing processes, it actually heats up the sealer and pushes it down into the concrete. So it's not on top and it doesn't walk off and leaving you with a, with a color. What's your cause. Once the sealer walks off, your color walks off from behind it, that does not happen with polished concrete Little Rock, AR.
Bob:
And the polished concrete Little Rock we're actually making that surface, the actual surface of the concrete, your finished floor. So it's your hard, shiny surface. And like Ryan said, we densified and densification is this process where it's chemical process that takes place in the very upper surface of the concrete. That actually makes that top of the concrete more spill resistant, stain resistant and makes it more resistant to scratching as well. What kind of places do you think that this would be appropriate for at all? For our standpoint, we can say everywhere, but what are some great places that you think we've done?
Ryan:
Restaurants, storefronts storage units, re homes, businesses, office show rooms, we've done mechanical shops. We've done car show areas just about anywhere. The only place that I wouldn't recommend, it is in a kitchen setting in a restaurant because of the slip prevention, you want to do an anti-slip floor in the kitchen, but anywhere else in a restaurant, the front serving areas, great restrooms are great. We did a walkway around a gymnasium. Anything that's interior, it has to be, it really needs to be an interior concrete for us to Polish.
Bob:
And the great thing about the polishing process is, again, it's the low maintenance. It keeps looking when we're done. It keeps looking that way with minimal effort for several years, depending on foot traffic. When we have a customer that is a highly foot traffic commercial area, we'll recommend semi-annual or maybe annual maintenance on there where we come in, just touched up a little bit, maybe apply another coat of sealer on there to make sure that topcoat is sealed real good, but I can, I can give a great example of one though, that was done about five years ago, a school we did, and they have not done anything for maintenance on there other than a dust mop and wet mop their floors. And they are still happy as can be with them. They actually had us go all the way to Bentonville and doing another school for them because it turned out so well. Yep.
Ryan:
Those, and that's talking about a school, that's a super high traffic. There's just nonstop traffic in it nine months out of the year. Yep.
Bob:
Now that we can do more than just add some color to concrete, though. Somebody's looking for more personalization or customization. What are some little tips and tricks we have or add ons that we can do to kind of make a floor really stand out? Yeah.
Ryan:
Like in a business setting, which we're talking about doing in our own showroom is a, we can do stencil work where we can add a logo or a name or some lettering into the concrete. And then we Polish that color into the concrete as well. And we also do engraving etching. We can do soft cut lines. We can do a lot of different things to make it more of a decorative polished concrete as well. Yeah.
Bob:
So when you do your concrete staining Little Rock, AR, you're adding kind of your personal touch to your floor. And as you know, people, that's what they see when they come into your home or business is, I mean, everybody, whether you realize it or not, you look at the floor, we didn't realize how much until we started in this business. And then again, when you start realizing that man, every time I walk in someplace, I am assessing a floor and it's not because now we are in this business. It's just because that's just what you do when you walk into a place it's one of your first impressions is, you know, how well is it lit? What's the floor look
Ryan:
Well, clean is some nice floor and shiny equals clean. That's one of the big customers of polished concrete is Walmart and Walmart's philosophy is shiny, is clean and really the biggest, the biggest business in the States or world. Really the biggest, I mean, I think they got something going, right, exactly. I mean, when you look
Bob:
At places like a target or a Walmart, your, your big box stores, every little penny, they spend matters because they have so many stores and you go into those stores, you do not see VCT tiles anymore. And there's a very simple reason why you don't VCT tiles are cheap. They're inexpensive, they're quick to put in, but you lose that money on the maintenance side because they cost a lot to maintain a years ago when I was in college, I was in the grocery business and we did not have concrete staining Little Rock, AR back then. So the VCT tiles in our grocery store, I know at least twice, if not three times a week, a company came in at night when the store was closed and would have to completely strip and wax the entire floor because there's so much traffic through there and worse yet when a VC tile broke or cracked, there was absolutely no hope of finding an exact matching VCT tile. So I'm sure you've seen that in stores, too, Ryan, where you walk in and someone's got this little spot that's been fixed and it's obvious it's been fixed because there's different colors.
Ryan:
No, that's also with any tile, porcelain tile or any tile that you put down, you're not going to find a matching from that lot unless you bought a whole pallet just to keep your floor going. There's no money in that. Or with polished concrete, the maintenance on that yearly maintenance on say like my house or, or a storefront that we've done it's we can come back. Usually we average between three and $4 a square foot for our initial start to end process. Well, in a year or two, we can come back in for under a dollar. It usually in the 80 cent range, we can come in and do a maintenance on that floor. Well, we may hit it with a high grit diamond, or a lot of times we just clean it with a black scrubby pad with one of our machines, and then we seal it and clean it and burnish it again.
Bob:
And what that does, it kind of tunes up that very top part of the concrete, like we've been talking about. So I'm going to do the concrete staining Little Rock, AR. You have got that color presiding sort of in the top of the concrete. And we're just making sure that that part of the concrete doesn't get wore out and color starts to walk off. Like you see on so many where guys have done concrete staining Little Rock, AR and they've gone and done the color and the roll sealer like Ryan was talking about her.
Ryan:
Everybody's been in the restaurant where you walk in and to the left and the right of you, you see dark Brown or dark red or something in the middle. It's just gray, concrete from all the high traffic and the greasy footprints.
Bob:
It was great color along the walls
Ryan:
In the middle. Nobody walks the edges of the room, but in the high traffic, we call it the field of the floor in the middle of the field. It's always gone where within polished concrete, it stays uniform as long as it's maintenance once a year or every couple of years and concrete that you keep an area, you keep a a field that maintain the same optimal field throughout the whole slab.
Bob:
And the number of concrete stain colors we have available is just absolutely amazing. We've got a, well, we've got a book that we usually take our sales calls, which is just about any color you could possibly want, but we have other colors available as well too. Oh yeah.
Ryan:
And we can do, we can do model colors where we like do a red and a black mixed together to where you get real high and lows. Cause your concrete slabs going to give you high and lows and the colors. Anyway, it's not going to be a solid color, like a solid Brown or a solid red or a solid gray. You're going to have light gray, dark gray, you know, throughout the slab. But to make that even more rustic or just more marbled, look, we can add two different colors, three different colors into the slab, and then we Polish it. It makes it popped up and gives it a marbling effect.
Bob:
Yeah. In, in concrete staining Little Rock, AR, what causes that is, even though your concrete is all say out front in best case scenario, all from one poor you know, the concrete in different areas of the slab is going to set up differently as the guys who use their trowels over the top of it, it's going to cause it to shift differently, more cream rise to the top in one spot. So
Ryan:
With the trowels, it's called burnishing. When you get the dark, dark, dark gray spots where the trowel machine is actually burned the top of the slab,
Bob:
Which actually love because we think it adds such great character to our floors. That color kind of gets in there and adds little, extra depth to your floor. If you will. Anything else on our concrete staining Little Rock, AR for a surface renew?
Ryan:
Not until next week when we discuss concrete polishing or marble polishing.