Concrete Staining & Marbling Overlay in Columbus, Ohio is one of our favorite decorative concrete floor coatings. We’ve spent a long time mastering our technique to make it unique from other contractors. Our most popular Tuscan Slate design is our gray blend of concrete. With that said, I wanted to go over how we install this concrete overlay – which is similar to previous ways. Also, this allows me to share progress pictures from a project that we completed back in August. I always love sharing our installation photos and videos as it also tells everyone who did the project. We recently found a couple other contractors in Ohio using our photos to market their business. Which is actually flattering to know that others want to be you!
Concrete Grinding
As always,we begin every project by preparing the concrete for our coating materials. We diamond grind the surface 9 out of 10 times, unless for other reasons. Diamond grinding allows us to reach a certain surface profile made suitable for our coatings to grab and hold onto the concrete. As I like to say, our coating is there until you decide to remove it or the concrete itself. We’ve seen plenty of epoxy and concrete coating failures throughout the years so we’ve invested in the right equipment and knowledge to ensure the integrity of our work. We know our work is not the cheapest which is why we want to give all our clients the most for their money.
Applying Basecoat
After we have ground the entire floor surface, we then begin the installation by applying a base coat. This base coat gives the “background” or “underneath” color of our Tuscan Slate. This coat is always darkest in any situation which allows for the top coat concrete to really pop and show off the design. After the base coat has dried, we then come back and scrape any “heavy spots” or any drip marks. It is essential to clean this coat up so that when we are troweling we do not receive any weird marks/spots. Next, in this process we then begin troweling out the design with 2 different shades of concrete, this gives us our concrete marbling effect. You can see this effect throughout the finished pictures. Most of our clients now prefer the concrete marbling over the concrete staining design. However, we still do concrete staining from time to time.
Applying Epoxy Coat
All of our concrete colors can be manipulated to closely match any specific need. We worked very closely with the designer on this project to achieve the color that they desired. Actually, we had him there when we mixed the color together to ensure that the color was correct. After we’ve cleaned the floor up, we then came back to apply a protective epoxy coating over the entire floor. It is always stressful to me when we do concrete overlay projects because the color dries a lot lighter than when wet. When we put that epoxy over top and the color changes, that is the exciting part – besides the smile on the clients face. However, this one turned out great and we actually were told by long time decorative concrete artisan and long time friend, Andy Franklin @ The Concrete Protector, that this was on of the best he has ever seen.
Check out our YouTube channel for more videos, here is the one on this project:
