The world's foremost magazine on decorative concrete
Concrete’s natural color can be altered with powder or liquid stains, dyes and colored hardeners, as well as aggregates such as ground glass and stone.
Contractors and artisans use specially made stencils and stains to leave their marks on decorative concrete.
When it came to installing floors at his new decorative concrete training facility, concrete guru Bob Harris chose to emulate the old ways of Venetian artists.
Many of us are tackling more intricate designs, such as 3-D tile patterns with multiple borders. With patterns like that, there’s no concrete (pardon the pun) stopping point for hand brushing. Expansion joints help create stopping points but outside of that how can we brush large designs without the glaring brush marks?
When choosing to use colored concrete on a project, there is very often a discrepancy between the owner’s expectations and the reality of the finished job. Two major reasons for this are that manufacturers’ color charts cannot possibly show the true color, and most contractors fail to adequately explain this to the customer.
Five projects that featured products from the Scofield line, a brand of Sika Corp., were honored in the 11th annual Decorative Concrete Awards competition. First-place winners and runners-up were announced during the 2019 World of Concrete in Las Vegas.
Mobile mixers, sometimes called volumetric mixers or metered concrete, offer a variety of benefits to decorative concrete contractors, including only paying for what is used, eliminating hot loads, readily allowing mix design changes on-site, labor savings, admixture additions and color batching.
Stained, integrally colored or other decorative concrete treatments will eventually need a freshening up if not a total do-over.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve written articles on how I use math to break down design layout and my views of color theory. This time, I’m going to share one of the little details that help my projects look amazing — how to properly use a brush.
As part of the Aagen Group’s renovation of its facilities in Houston, the Business Flooring Specialists refurbished the company’s shipping and receiving ramp. The ramp was showing wear and tear and also needed its traction improved — especially when it was wet.
When Christina Arnall signed up for Ben Ashby’s advanced countertop class in Las Vegas about four years ago, she had no idea it would lead to an epiphany. It began when Ashby introduced the group to his ½-inch admix being used to create a shower panel and they decided to color it blue.
