By Gaye Goodman

On this website I give a list of “Preferred Suppliers.”  I would like to explain why we list two kinds of cementitious fillers by Lyons Manufacturing. Both are very good fillers, but we found out the hard way that Patchcrete should be used ONLY for flat patches and never in cracks. Super Flowcrete, which comes in large sacks and is made to be used as a slightly rough gray overlayment, however, is just fine to use as a pre-stain crack filler.

My crew had been using Super Flowcrete to fill cracks for years. Just prior to staining we would clean out and vacuum the cracks in the floor, apply bonding cement with a woodworker’s syringe or accordion squeeze bottle, so that it went only into the crack, and let it set up until dry.  We then mixed the powdered Flowcrete with enough water to make a stiff paste and pressed it into the cracks, being careful to wipe away any excess alongside the crack before it set up. All of this is shown clearly in my DVD, “Acid Staining for Commercial Spaces.”  As you can see, this is a procedure requiring two steps, often with an hour’s wait for the bonding agent to set up within the crack.

One day our supplier gave us a box of Patchcrete by Lyons and told us that it would speed things up. The bonding cement (or polymer) does not need to be squeezed into the crack first, but is mixed right in with the dry powder and pressed into the crack as soon as you are ready to fill it. The crew went for this shorter system and also liked the fact that the Patchcrete was finer (less gritty) than the Super Flowcrete, which made the texture of the filled crack match the floor better. So we switched to Patchcrete for both hole-filling and crack-filling and seemed to be doing fine with it UNTIL we had a catastrophe. Naturally, this occurred on a problem house with a fairly particular client – a house where another problem with stain absorbed by the rough-finished Variance walls had already wiped out our profit margin!

Photo A

The homeowners had moved into their new home and were happy with their floors. All our work had been done in the spring and summer months. That winter they turned on their radiant heat and “Whoa!–” every crack we had filled proceeded to chip and turn white.  Photo A shows what happened to one crack in a bathroom. There were fifty such cracks all around the house.

Photo B

The owners called and told me that our filler was popping out of the cracks. I had never seen THAT happen before, so I rushed over to look. It was not true. The Patchcrete was still holding well in the original cracks, but the thin, delicate “cream layer” on each side bordering our filled cracks was chipping off, taking all our stain with it. (Evidence that acid stain only penetrates about 1/16th of an inch into most slabs).

Photo C

We could only conclude that when the radiant floor heat was turned on, the slab expanded as it warmed. There was no space for the slab to expand into, since the Patchcrete was smooth (not grainy) and very durable. So what “gave way” was the delicate layer of surface concrete bordering the crack.

Photo D

This house was not a fluke. Several other radiant floors produced the same problem for us that winter. Here is how we fixed the now-wide cracks and made them almost disappear:

Photo B:  We tapped along the crack with a rubber mallet to break off anything which was about to pop anyway.

Photo C:  We scraped up the loose material.

Photo E

Photo D:  With a toothbrush-sized wire brush, we cleaned out the concrete powder and debris from the crack and vacuumed it up.

Photo E:   We filled the void with a pliable latex crack filler made by DAP or Custom Building Products. These are sold in the paint department at Home Depot as concrete crack fillers. They only come in white (even the ones labeled gray look white to me).

Photo F

Photo F:  We only fill a foot at a time, since the product sets up fairly fast. We wipe away excess filler from the sides of the void with a damp microfiber rag. We find that a microfiber rag is much more effective than a damp sponge or piece of fabric.

Photo G

Photo G:  Once the filler has hardened enough to form a firm skin (in an hour or so) we can mix artist’s acrylic paints in colors to match the background floor and paint the area with a small brush. It may take two coats of acrylic paint to cover the white filler.  We have since found that artist’s acrylics can be mixed right into latex fillers to color them, often eliminating the need for this step (see Blog #6 re: cracks on black floors).

The final step is always to brush the repaired cracks with two coats of Terra Glaze Final Finish with a small brush. This is done to increase the gloss of the matte acrylic paint and to protect our faux paint from scuffing. These three layers of material are all acrylic, so they bond well together and are durable. We found that latex crack filler tends to sink a bit, or slump, as it dries when it is put into depressions greater than 1/8th of an inch.  The filled area ends up looking smooth, but dimpled. It took us two or three fillings, letting each layer dry firmly, before we could get the deeper spots level with the rest of the floor.

In this case luck was finally with us. The cracks we treated crawled all over the house and did not look as subtle as they had before the catastrophe. However, our clients had found their evenly-stained floors a bit plain and said that they liked the way the cracks now made the floor look more like stone. Proof, once again, that “it is better to be lucky than smart,” as I always say.

We no longer risk using Patchcrete to fill cracks, but it is perfect for broad depressions or patches in the floor and takes acid stain very well.

By Gaye Goodman

We recently had two separate clients who wanted the drama of black floors throughout their homes. I hope this does not signal a new trend towards black floors. We usually try to talk people out of this by showing them how attractive black stain can look when it is diluted in half with acid water to a variegated gray-brown color. The problem is that it’s a constant struggle to keep black floors looking decent. Each dusty footprint and every bit of sand which blows in through the door will show up white against the dark background. We warn client s that they will need to dust mop their floors daily. However, both parties were adamant and chose the darkest of the samples we did for them.

During our first job, set in a splendid high valley in Colorado, we discovered even more problems which crop up with black floors, creating a good deal more work for the staining crew. I will take problems and solutions in the order in which they occurred.

Photo A

First, no matter how well we sand and scrub a slab in preparation for staining, we find that the stain usually pulls back from the cracks in the slab, which emphasizes them and makes them look wider than they are. Photo A shows how this effect is heightened when the color chosen is black. We find this happens more often with the large cracks we have filled, but also with hairline cracks which we do not fill. If you have seen my DVD’s you know that we use tiny syringes to inject the cracks with concrete glue prior to filling and take every care NOT to smear glue on either side of the crack, since we know that the glue will repel our stain. The edges along cracks DO take stain, but it is usually several shades paler than the rest of the floor. My hunch is that when a slab cracks, it lifts a tiny bit along both sides of the crack, causing the wet stain to roll away, like water down the sides of a mountain range.

Photo B

In this residence we applied two coats of solvent-based acrylic sealer and left the site for four months while plasterers and stone masons finished some walls and countertops were installed. The builder protected the floors wall-to-wall with rosin paper and laid sheets of cardboard over the entire area. This prevented damage by abrasion to the sealer but there was still a thick layer of dust under the paper which we needed to clean up when we returned to apply the acrylic final finish. Photo B shows how the floors looked when we got back to the site.

Solvent sealers have what is called “dirt pick-up” – an almost magnetic attraction for dust – until the final finish is applied. Each room must be vacuumed meticulously with a top quality vacuum, then damp-mopped with frequent changes of water before it will be clean enough to seal. If you try to clean too large an area, the portion you have just cleaned will become white with dust by the time you have finished cleaning the next section. Floor cleaners must wear booties and avoid walking back over dusty areas, or they become a part of the problem.

Photo C

When we got each room clean enough to see the floor clearly, another problem became apparent. A white ring of efflorescence followed the pale edge of every tiny crack which we had not filled. This was a surprise to us all, since the house was built on a hilltop and the builder had installed a moisture-vapor barrier under the slab.  Such a small amount of calcium carbonate coming to the surface would probably not have shown against a paler shade of stain. Open expanses in the kitchen and living-room were laced with a network of white bordered cracks, like those seen in Photo C.

We tried the “easy fix” first, rubbing the white stuff off with lacquer thinner or xylene on a rag. This erased some of it, but large areas were trapped under the upper layer of sealer, which had to be rubbed completely through. As we thought about it, we realized that unless we filled every one of the hairline cracks, more efflorescence would surely emerge through them after future rains and snowfalls. We had to bite the bullet and fill every minute crack in the house before we could begin to faux paint away the lines of efflorescence.

For post-stain crack filling we use DAP or Custom Home Builders’ latex crack filler, which comes in a soft plastic tube. We squeeze it out on a paper plate and press it into the cracks with a flexible spatula and wipe the excess away from the sides of the crack with a damp rag. These fillers are smooth and fine-grained and can fill the tiniest crack. They are bright white, however, so we mixed some dark brown-black artist’s acrylic paint into the latex filler with a palette knife before pressing it into the cracks. We knew this would save us time later in the touch-up phase.

Photo D

Photo E

After a long day filling cracks they looked better, but opaque and not patterned like the rest of the floor, as in Photo D. You can see from the next shot (E) that the floor was by no means a solid black color, but had a pattern of darker raindrops and blobs scattered against a lighter background shade.  This is the sort of wonderful natural patterning which makes stained concrete so special and endearing to us. But it meant that in order to render the cracks less visible, we had to work in layers from the bottom up, with the top layer of faux paint being a translucent black applied in raindrop fashion with a tiny round artist’s brush.  It took two artists 24 hours of mixing and dabbing to bring all the filled areas into harmony with the rest of the floor.

Even with gloss medium added to the acrylic paint, it dries much less glossy than the rest of the solvent-sealed floor. To bring everything up to the same durability and level of gloss, we had to roll on a fresh coat of solvent sealer, let it gas off for 36 hours, and then apply our two coats of Terra Glaze Final Finish.

Guess what? Despite locked doors and restricted traffic zones during the gas-off period, the floors had to be wiped down with microfiber covered mops several times more before we could apply the final finish.

Photo F

Photo F shows the kitchen floor, finished at last.  We really liked the conscientious builder and the owners of this home, so we did not have the heart to charge them for four extra days of cleaning and faux painting, but we are quite glad that these black floors are now their responsibility.  On the drive home we decided that we would charge extra the next time a client wants black floors!

By Gaye Goodman

We have discovered a great floor stripper which may open up new jobs for you and will certainly make the whole process somewhat easier. My crew really dislikes re-doing other people’s botched floors. However, in the current economy, those are the jobs we are getting and we are only too glad to have them!

One of my favorite custom home builders called me in to see the floors of his own home which he had stained by his house painter before he knew much about acid staining.  The painter actually did a fine job on the floor prep and staining, but he was given bad advice on which sealer to purchase. He was sold a “urethane enhanced acrylic” which was meant for wood floors. It looked beautiful for the first few months, but began to flake and peel in the traffic areas for the next nine years. This builder has two active children, a frantic dervish-dog, and an artist wife who paints in one room.

I did some test stripping in a corner of his study. I have found it does not pay to base your stripping estimate on a test done on the flaking areas, so I selected a secluded spot where the sealer appeared completely intact. I thought I was simply dealing with a cheap water-based acrylic. We often use a janitorial wax stripper on these with good success. That did not touch it. Next I tried a strong citrus cleaner, letting it soak for 20 minutes, then scrubbing hard. It only penetrated in a few high spots. When my client put me in touch with the local sales outlet for his sealer and I spoke with them, it was clear they had no idea how to remove it.

I sure didn’t want to turn down this large job, but the client wanted me to remove the impermeable sealer and replace it without removing the stain from the floor, since he was in love with the look of the original. That meant that sanding or removing the cream layer of the slab was not an option. I recalled that my friend and staining colleague, John Rodriguez, had been urging me to try a new low-VOC stripper which he had been using lately. He had provided me with some half-pint sample bottles which I had stashed in my truck and forgotten about.

I got out the bottle of thick, gooey Newlook Easystrip 1000 and tried mixing it with warm water before applying it to the floor. It did not seem to mix with water at all, so it must be meant to be brushed on full strength. It appears a lot like liquid latex rubber. I spread it on thinly and waited 15 minutes. Voila! It ate right through that tough sealer and darkened the concrete. John told me it could be sprayed on large areas or rolled on with a paint roller. It remains thick and must be scraped up with a wide razor scraper. Once most of the glop is wiped onto old rags, the residue can be scrubbed away with a TSP solution and a black pad on the rotary buffer.  (The web address for this product is www.getnewlook.com).

I bought a five-gallon pail and we set to work on the builder’s house while he took his family on vacation. We soon found that by applying Easystrip 1000 full strength to a dry or even a dampened floor, we were wasting a lot of product which sat on the surface and did not penetrate well. There was a lot of scraping involved and many spots of old sealer remained. It took us four hours to do one bedroom this way.

Remembering that we were working in an extremely dry desert climate, we decided to ignore the instructions and mix the stripper 1:1 with warm water to increase penetration. Once it was stirred in a bucket, it did not want to mix with the water, but looked like Chinese egg drop soup. We poured this on the floor and spread it out with a rapid circular motion using a Doodle-bug pad and holder. After some brushing the stripper mixed with the water and turned into something which covered the floor evenly with a shaving cream consistency. We let it soak in for 15 minutes and could tell by the even darkening of the floor when it was ready to be removed. We gathered most of it together with a large floor squeegee and wiped it onto rags. A subsequent TSP scrub removed most of the residue, but we did two such scrubs to remove every bit from edges and corners. The second bedroom, done in this manner, took us half as long as the first.

This house had nice white enameled baseboards in every room. We always mask these with three layers of tape when stripping floors. We use a medium-tack tape along the very lowest edge to the floor, then another layer goes on with the masking plastic when we use the masking machine, and finally we try to “waterproof” the lowest edge by putting a band of two-inch colored stucco tape on top. Invariably we find that fluid strippers like citrus cleaner tend to puddle against the walls and creep up under all these layers, holding the stripper against the wall, so the walls get partially stripped also.

I warn my clients in advance that they will probably have to repaint their baseboards. A wonderful side-effect of using a thick stripper like Easystrip 1000 is that it does not flow. Most of the stain color in the floor was also left intact. This might be a fluke. I have never before stripped sealer and had any color left to speak of. When we removed our masking after restaining a few gray spots and doing a post-stain scrub, we found the painted baseboards in pristine condition. That seemed like a small miracle to me!

Finished Floor

Soon after this experience we had another remodel. The clients removed their living-room carpet and wanted us to stain the concrete floor underneath. There were the usual wide bands of carpet pad glue in snaking lines bordering the walls. We were able to get a good portion of the glue off with a citrus cleaner soak. We found that the Easystrip (which is really made for paints and sealers) did not remove glue on the first pass, but after most of it was lifted by means of citrus scrubbing, it worked very well to loosen the remainder of glue which was deep in the pores of the slab. After some wire-brushing on these areas, we removed more carpet pad glue than we had ever been able to do before.

Newlook also makes an Easystrip 2000 which is meant to remove epoxies. We have not tried that yet, and sincerely hope we will not have to.

If you have ever wished you could land really big jobs, twenty, thirty, fifty-thousand square feet or more, but were worried about the risks and didn’t really know how to play the game at that level, then this post will be very good news for you.

My newest video, called “Acid Staining for Commercial Spaces,” is in DVD format only. It is on sale now at the store on my website at www.gayegoodman.com.  It will be useful to professional stainers, architects, interior designers and ambitious homeowners who want more in depth information for their DIY project.I had several reasons for making the new video. I wanted to update my earlier video, “How to Stain Concrete Floors” with some new techniques we’ve adopted to make our work speedier and more efficient. I also wished to discuss some important business matters, which I did not do in the first video. So this is a film primarily for professionals.  I include the kinds of problems which arise on very large jobs, as well as those involving the removal of curing compound, enamel paint, latex overspray, and many other things that stainers often encounter, even on a “new, clean” commercial slab.

Last September, Robin Peters and Caleb Thomas, from Dreamscape Design, flew from Illinois to Albuquerque for three days of filming, bringing most of their equipment. They rented a large moveable boom on which to mount the camera so we could get nice shots from above of the entire crew at work. We managed to film all the work sequences in three days. We started in my office at Faux Real, and then moved to the completed Albuquerque International Balloon Museum to shoot the beginning and ending of the script in which I talk about job planning and special designs using stencils.

The third day of shooting covered the entire process of cleaning, staining, and sealing a commercial floor in all its stages. I had been consulting with Alex Leonard, the developer of a new community in the mountains east of Albuquerque, called Nature Pointe. He was constructing a large clubhouse to be his community center with a workout room, billiard and game rooms, kitchen, offices, and a lounge entry equipped with two large fireplaces. Everything except the basketball court was to be in stained concrete. Alex planned to have me train his crew to do the staining, but I offered him a very good deal to have our crew prep and stain the floors, in exchange for his cooperation with our video shoot. This benefitted both of us.

We had completed about one-third of the floor staining before the film crew arrived, so we had clean, finished floors on which to demonstrate sealing and final waxing.  Other areas were stained, but not sealed, and still others were completely raw.  Alex gave us such a clean slab that we had to throw blobs of enamel paint down and “fake” some of the shots we needed to illustrate problem clean-ups. One thing we didn’t have to fake was what happens if someone spills battery acid on your slab! We found a deeply etched rough patch by one column which did not take our stain at all, so I was able to demonstrate how these spots can be colored with penetrating dyes and then faux-painted to match the existing floor .

I was surprised to discover that a one hour long video takes about ten times as long to write and edit as a twenty-minute video. I also found out the hard way that editing cannot be done using long distance phone calls and e-mails, if one is particular about the “look” one wants. In the end, Dreamscapes did the rough editing and then shipped me the hard drive with all their work on it. I was able to take it to a professional editor nearby, Edit House, whose owner worked side-by-side with me through the final editing, music and titles.

Much of the narration was done as a voiceover during the video and still shots. I recorded this at the studio of one of my workers, Ryan Martino. Ryan only works on my crew occasionally. His real forte is as a sound engineer for musicians. He did a great job and is a sound perfectionist.

My publisher and I decided that we really should include a Bonus Section on the DVD to cover some of the business and insurance matters which arise when you decide to bid on public jobs. Adding this delayed us by another few months. We filmed the Bonus segment as an interview at the headquarters of Bridgeworks in Albuquerque.  I also assembled over twenty still shots of nice commercial floors which we have completed in the past, and set them up as a Slide Show on the DVD so that you or your architect can show that segment by itself to clients, as an example of what can be done with acid staining.

We shot the video to be “product neutral” with few specific brand names mentioned.  We are posting a list of brand names of all the supplies we used in the video (listed by chapter), which purchasers can download. Decosup Inc. at www.decosup.com is carrying the same line of acid stains that we used in the video.

In conclusion I will say that I included everything which I would have liked to have in an educational video when I was starting out in this business. It is complete, but moves along quickly. You can return to whatever chapter you need to review, thanks to DVD technology and your Menu button. I feel you will soon gain a boost in confidence and be able to reap new profits from your copy of “Acid Staining for Commercial Spaces.”  I look forward to your feedback on the DVD.

Happy staining!

By Gaye Goodman

I don’t know about you, but most of the contractors in the city of Albuquerque are starting to feel squeezed by the building slowdown which has been in progress around the country for several years now.  We used to have the luxury of turning down requests to acid stain backyard patios and garages, preferring the working conditions and artistic scope of indoor jobs. Now we have to settle for whatever small jobs we can get.

As you may know, the Southwestern style of  building involves a great deal of adobe, most of it an imitation latex product called Sto, which is full of coarse sand grains and looks like adobe, but which easily absorbs our acid stain. We can etch stain out of real adobe with an acid-water solution, but not with Sto. This means that before patio staining we must protect adjoining house walls from the ravages of our stain.  We’ve been using colored duct tape pressed down along the bottom edge, but it is hard to get it to adhere well, especially if the stucco is very grainy.

Photo 1

When I was in New Zealand working in Roy’s studio, he introduced me to a great product called liquid latex rubber. Various companies produce it and sell it in cans to artists who wish to create their own molds for casting. This is what Roy was using it for. He would go to a beach when the tide was out and paint on several layers of the viscous yellow substance, allowing it to dry in the sun between coatings. Soon he could peel the entire mass up starting at one corner and voila, he had his own homemade texture mat for stamping the surface of freshly laid concrete to replicate whatever stone surface he’d selected.

Photo 2

We found that it made an excellent resist material on our art boards.  You can apply it to a stained and cleaned surface or an unstained one – it will completely block any acid stain which you apply to the board. When you want to remove it, you start at the edge and peel it up easily like a thick rubber cement. The surface underneath will be pristine and ready to receive a contrasting stain color or clear sealer. The liquid latex rubber leaves no residue.

Photo 4

Here we are applying it to the central petal of a flower design (which we will later dye violet) and around the outer edge of two petals into which we will brush blue dye.

You can order liquid latex rubber through www.tapplastics.com. They call it Mold Builder.

We had a large patio job to do and rather than struggle with the colored duct tape, which always

Photo 5

ends up lifting off before the job is done, I asked the homeowner if we could experiment with some liquid latex on his walls. We applied about four square inches as a test and left it for two days, then peeled it off. There was a very faint line where the latex had been, but it was not due to any damage to his stucco wall—we had simply removed a layer of dust and dirt!

Before scrubbing and staining the patio we applied two inches of latex all around the lowest edges of the walls. When it had dried we put masking plastic over it using the usual masking machine loaded with tape. The tape adhered well to the latex since the bumpy sand grains were smoothed over by the latex. We still used colored duct tape to pin the upper edge of our masking plastic two feet up the wall. Our masking remained up for the four days it took us to scrub the patios, stain, rescrub, and apply two coats of masonry sealer. Since then we have found that the latex rubber requires an overnight dry time if the temperature is around freezing. In the summer it will dry in an hour. I am thrilled to have finally solved the stucco problem which had been plaguing us for 3 years on outdoor jobs.

By Gaye Goodman

Photo 1

(Photo 1 is of Roy and Jose in their garden).

I apologize for announcing my new blog, then being slow to begin it. I recently returned from a five-week trip to spectacular New Zealand. Since my floor staining business is slow in December and January that is when I schedule my vacation trips. This year I went to see Roy and his wife, Jose (spelled “Josie” in American English) Snowball, who live in the countryside about an hour north of Auckland.  They invited me to stay in their rambling home, which Roy calls “the mausoleum,” and treated me like visiting royalty. December and January are full summer in the Southern Hemisphere, so we were able to experiment for hours in Roy’s open-air studio.

Photo 2

On my first visit two years ago we worked on landscape boards which Roy trimmed down to about 2 feet by 4 feet. (Photo 2 is of Autumn Vista, an art board we did).

While our experiments were curing we could take side trips to any number of spectacular coves and beaches near Roy’s home. This is not a bad way to work! (Photo 3 is of Gaye taking a swim break).   I also spent three weeks on my own touring the South Island and staying in inexpensive hostels – the best way to meet other travelers.

Photo 3

Roy is an old hand at concrete placement and stamping and has been doing decorative acid staining ever since he took one of my Albuquerque seminars five years ago. He knows a great deal about chemistry and manufactures his own stains. His website is www.quantumacidstains.co.nz.

For studio work he has developed a super fine-grained microtopping which can be thinly troweled onto concrete backer-boards and stained in multiple layers. If the first coat of topping is tinted gray and allowed to dry and a second coat of white is applied very thinly over it, you can see swirling trowel marks showing through the upper layer of microtopping which is translucent.

Photo 4

If this is then stained with brown, the color will be nicely mottled instead of solid. Photo 4 is of an oval tabletop Roy made and stained brown, laying pieces of dried grass into the wet stain.

One can continue adding “veils” of translucent microtopping and staining them until a great deal of depth is achieved. When Roy applies his solvent-based sealer the result looks very much like fine polished marble. Photo 5 shows a blue and brown tabletop Roy did in this way.

Acid staining as a floor finish is virtually unknown in New Zealand, so clients wanting interior floors are rare. Local stainers have to use acid stain in other ways and are finding that garden furniture, large planters, and garden wall plaques are more often in demand than flooring.

Photo 5

New Zealand has a temperate, lush climate and homeowners spend more time outdoors than in. Roy and I visited the

studios of four of his artist friends and I was impressed with the variety and ingenuity of their work. I will report on their work in future blogs.

Photo 6

Roy is specializing in creating outdoor furniture of polystyrene glued and sandwiched between two concrete boards so as to make tabletops which are lightweight, yet durable enough to withstand heavy rains. He has been experimenting with central motifs using stencils of local fauna such as the “Leafy Seahorse” shown on the tabletop in Photo 6.

It is a rare joy to be able to collaborate in the studio with another artist (since egos and opinions about art often block consensus).  Roy allowed me to make decisions about composition, while I followed his lead on what chemistry and layering might best achieve the look we wanted.  We worked on multiple boards at a time so that the serendipitous events happening on one work could then inspire a new direction on the second or third board. Certainly we had some failures and created some messes, but nothing that could not be resurrected by another layer of Roy’s miracle microtopping!  In Photo 7 I am staining some boards on the floor of his studio.

Photo 7

It is invigorating to take time out from the business of staining floors and repairing floors to look around and see what other concrete stainers are doing. I returned to the U.S. with new energy and a more expansive view of the possibilities inherent in our craft.