Concrete Decor's Current Articles

Even at its best, owning a business offers a host of challenges. One of the latest: how to get and keep good employees.

The 2019 World of Concrete has been held, and it topped the charts as the largest show in more than a decade. The annual extravaganza for the concrete and masonry industries attracted 60,511 attendees and more than 1,500 exhibiting companies spanning 776,800 square feet of space in the Las Vegas Convention Center in January 2019.

The issue of blisters and pin holes occurring on the surface of cast-in-place concrete and resin-based coatings and sealers is well documented, but surprisingly very little is published regarding the same issues in decorative overlays.

The historical structure that now houses the Nashville Dinner Theatre has always attracted attention. During Prohibition times, people slyly used a tunnel in the building to transport alcohol to area nightclubs. Today, it attracts crowds for its dinner shows and performances by local vocalists.

When good floor coatings go bad, moisture is often the culprit.

Even cured concrete can emit enough moisture to blister, cloud or delaminate a coating, especially when a slab with no vapor barrier sits on ground with poor drainage. The manufacturers of overlays, microcoatings, sealers and specialty coatings set moisture tolerance limits for their products.

Have you ever looked at your concrete-covered tools and wished you could just — poof! — make the hardened mess disappear?

Well, that’s the premise behind Poof!, a cleaning agent from Kover Krete Systems Inc. in Orlando, Fla.

Born out of frustration with the long learning curve for mastering GFRC, Cheng Concrete’s NeoMix D-FRC is designed to not only shorten that learning curve for contractors, but also to outperform traditional GFRC in regards to flexural strength and abrasion resistance.

With the addition of pigments, flakes and powders, these durable coatings can now add plenty of pizzazz to concrete floors.

Some large projects will require more than one pour to complete. Whether you are doing an overlay or stamped concrete, matching in to the previous days work is very important. Having a project look uniform from start to finish, will lessen headaches, make happier customers and sell more work.

Polishing contractors take note: There may be a future in grinding and sealing concrete driveways.

No matter how good your technique is, you won’t get an attractive, consistent pattern if your brush or broom has bent bristles. Here are some ways to avoid —or fix — the “bends.”

The Crack-Chaser Blade from Pearl Abrasive Company was designed for more efficient cleaning, routing and repairing of cracks in concrete. The diamond segments are sintered to the core in a V-shaped pattern, leaving a clean groove for filling.

Surface prep is not the most creative part of a decorative concrete project, but it’s also rarely the same old grind.

Snowmelt technology is, essentially, radiant heat applied to outdoor surfaces. There are few differences between the two heating techniques, and both can be used to heat low- or high-mass concrete surfaces to melt ice and snow, keeping surfaces safe and clear of icy accumulations.

There are ways to evaluate a floor for polishing before quoting it. You will need to develop benchmarks (on test floors you’re currently polishing) before you can accurately predict how a future floor will polish and what densifier to use on the floor.

Regular househousld items can be essential tooks when polishing concrete. Check out some of these tips from an expert to make your next job that much better.

At first, everything seemed perfect as my salesman and I finished setting up our booth for the annual home design and remodeling show in Visalia, Calif. Our exhibit location was ideal, our stamp and stain samples strategically located. The weekend crowd was near maximum capacity and everything seemed ripe for booking plenty of new accounts.

Dan Sawatzky’s background doesn’t immediately lend itself to him becoming a premier concrete artisan, but his creativity with concrete has led him to work that is far outside of the norm. Sawatzky’s Imagination Corporation is a backyard business run by father and son.