Remodeling 101: How to Revive Stained Concrete Floors, Color Edition
I’ve long cherished concrete flooring. I like their zero-upkeep enchantment, their industrial search that will get far better with time, and—though they do the job perfectly with radiant underfloor heating (see our Remodeling 101 on the topic)—I even like the experience of a great floor underfoot, specially when temperatures increase.
But I have a short while ago identified a flaw in concrete floors—something that experienced under no circumstances occurred to me until finally I tried to remediate the situation: If your concrete flooring are stained, their colour is very pretty much “set.” In my apartment, which is an inconsistently utilized, dusty purple. If you want to modify it, you’ll have to have to place in both important dollars or elbow grease.
To wade by means of the options, I talked to Anthony Zamora of C Rock Ending in Oakland, California—here’s what I uncovered.
How easy is it to change the color of stained concrete floors?
Not quite. “Concrete is like a big rock sponge,” Zamora says. “Before it has just about anything on it, it desires to soak up anything.” Indicating that what ever has by now been used to your concrete flooring has fundamentally altered the materials and will have an effect on coloration likely forward. This is a generalization, of course—but when flooring are “stained,” or more precisely, handled with a penetrating sealant, the coloration has been absorbed to an mysterious depth.
To alter the colour, we’re masking the two most widespread alternatives here: You can re-stain the floors (by applying a new penetrating sealant) or paint them (by implementing an industrial coating). Other alternatives contain staining and then sprucing your flooring (which achieves a distinct impact than just re-staining) or covering them solely with a new material, like a microtopping or concrete overlay.
How can I re-stain my concrete flooring?
To start off, you will need to have to have the existing surface mechanically ground down, each to key the concrete to take a new stain and to take out as significantly of the offending shade as achievable. “You just cannot handle how substantially stain permeated the concrete in the original procedure,” Zamora states.It could be superficial and arrive off fairly immediately, or it could have permeated as deeply as 50 percent an inch down, which indicates it’s not likely anyplace. You’ll need to mechanically grind your flooring to establish your up coming action.
What does it mean to mechanically grind the concrete?
You will need to use a little something more durable than concrete in order to grind it down, clarifies Zamora, which ordinarily usually means a substrate like steel, ceramic, or resin that is been impregnated with diamonds. “Diamonds are so sturdy that they can essentially cut up the surface of the concrete.”