Once in a great while I’m asked to create something extremely unique, occasionally it is for a home owner but mostly it is for a commercial setting such as a coffee shop, hair salon or even a tanning salon. It really does create more traffic for the client and I love it when they call me up to tell me so.
Over the years we have created some extremely unique floors with a very special method using a very common and cheap substance, ICE.
When you apply a concrete acid stain it normally sits on the surface for a while and keeps the surface wet. When using darker colors such as black and dark browns, that contain more metals salts, it is possible to dilute these stains using very cold water and sometimes ice. What this does is allow the solution to stay in a liquid state longer. Then the metals salts “crawl” and create some of the most unique patterns you have ever seen. Just like what you see to the right.
multi color concrete stain floor
There is no correct way to decide which colors should be used first, light or dark. It is just kind of a fee’ thing. For this floor we combined a light green with a small amount of black in the same sprayer and diluted the stain with 1 part water.
The front part of the coffee shop show here had large windows that let a lot of light in so we just left them alone because the back half of the shop was out of the direct sunlight and we knew our little method would work back there and that was where the wine bar was, yes we did it as a conversation piece and what a conversation piece it became.
The second step was to spray brown and black separately with extremely cold water also.
Normally we neutralize our stains after about 2-3 hours but our solution was made to last for at least 6-8 hours and as described before this allows the metals salts in the black and the brown to “crawl”.
There are always new ways to create uniquely beautiful concrete stain floors. Just let your imagination wander a little and you’ll be surprised what you might find.
