Concrete Rerun
Dear Suzy,
My son is building a home and he has heard of a way to make a concrete slab look like a Mexican tile floor. He was told was that you could score the concrete into tic-tac-toe squares, then paint the concrete, fill the scored grooves with grout, then high shellac the floor, etc. But he doesn’t know how or when to do what. Thanks for any help you can give me. — Kitty
Dear Kitty,
You know how on TV programs like “Murder She Wrote” and “Matlock” when the show’s stars were tired or on extended vacations they would put together a sort of flashback rerun, using clips from several previous shows and the star would just do a little voice-over and they’d call the whole mess New Programming? Or how about that nose-whistling Garrison Keillor getting away with rerunning episodes of Prairie Home Companion because they’re all so corny you can’t tell them apart anyway? Well, now I’m up to their old tricks, partly because I’m lazy and partly because I get so many questions about staining concrete. Three years ago, I wrote the following:
“Since concrete floors are now as common in chic-chic home magazines as sheer white curtains and lavish floral arrangements, I decided to stain some of the concrete floors in our new house and call it good.
“Richard’s been doing this for years using copperas, available at plant nurseries. It’s mixed with water and sprinkled on the slab from a mayo jar with a few holes poked in the lid. Don’t try to cover the whole floor with the first coat, but layer the stain, letting each coat dry before adding another. A mottled orange to terra-cotta color can be achieved by mixing one to three tablespoons of copperas to a pint of water. The cost for a 20 by 12 foot floor is about three dollars, not counting the mayonnaise.
“Not content to use a proven method, I embellished my stain with Rit Dye — wine, ochre, and gray. And I used way too much copperas. And I wiped it on, which left large cloud-like swirl marks on my floors which I had to convince myself that I liked. I sealed the floors with three coats of Mexican Saltillo Sealer, made by Mediterranean Exports. It’s water-based, easily recoated, and idiot-proof.”
Soon after I wrote this, we stained the floor in another section of our house. But first we scored it. (I use the pronoun “we” very loosely here; it was Richard who loaded the masonry blade in his circular saw and crawled around on his knees for several hours while the dust flew and the saw screamed.) Then I got in there with my strange mix of dyes — a little copperas, some Behr water-based wood stains (not recommended) and some more Rit dye. With the floor gridded off into 4′ by 4′ squares it was easier to control the application of the dye so that I didn’t wind up with huge swirl marks: Sometimes I dabbed it on with a sponge, other times I poured it on and squeegeed it off. The irregular results were surprisingly tile-like, so much so that people often ask where we got those huge tiles and how we moved them around.
I don’t know about sealing the concrete with shellac. Seems like an overkill — not to mention slick as snot — considering the wide variety of water-based concrete sealers on the market which are so user- and enviro-friendly. And if you keep your scored grooves shallow enough, I don’t think you’d need to grout them.
I also stained our concrete shower and wainscoting in the bathroom, this time using radically thinned Behr concrete stains. But that’s another episode entirely.
Are you sure you want my advice? If so, then e-mail your questions to me at: Suzebe@aol.com or snail mail ’em to: The Austin Chronicle, PO Box 49066, Austin, TX 78765.
This article appears in July 25 • 1997 and July 25 • 1997 (Cover).