Gaye’s “Acid Staining for Commercial Spaces” is currently available as part of the Professional Package through Amazon.com OR if you phone her directly, she can sell the DVD alone to you for a reasonable price. You can call Gaye with inquiries at (505) 246-9954.
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 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.
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!
