Concrete Overlay, Troweled Overlays, Self-Leveling, Cement Toppings

Sometimes there's no better way to finish a cementitious topping than to get down on your hands and kneeboards and go to town with a trowel.

Sure, self-levelers can cover large areas with a minimum of mess and manpower, they can render glass-smooth finishes with relative ease, and they can handle the traffic of even the most monstrous forklifts. But for creating decorative floors with a handcrafted feel, the trowel is hard to beat.

Not only do the imperfections of a hand-troweled floor have artistic merit in their own right (a concrete artisan's trowel marks are as unique as an artist's brush strokes), but they will cause stains and tinted sealers to react with the coating unevenly, resulting in marbled or mottled looks.

“You can kind of screw up a finishing job that you're going to stain and seal, and people will adore you to death,” says Julio Hallack, president and owner of Concrete Innovations in Turlock, Calif. “Many interior designers are very fond of these kinds of finishes and they want you to have innovations in your thinking.”

Indeed, in the right hands, a trowel can produce a far-ranging variety of finishes.

“The possibilities are virtually endless,” says Chris Sullivan, national technical director for QC Construction Products, a California-based cement products manufacturer. “You can do everything from creating a solid, monotone surface that looks just like gray concrete, all the way up to creating the effect of marble or stone or seamless linoleum tile where you've got multiple colors blended together in a random pattern.”