White Lake Residence

Have you ever heard the old adage about "making a silk purse out of a sow's ear"?  That is essentially what we did on this acid-stained basement concrete flooring project.  Above are two photos of the finished appearance of the 800-foot floor.

The next two photos show before and after.  From this perspective, the beginning floor doesn't look too bad - it's just covered in drywall dust.  The rectangle under the stairs is where the stack of drywall sat prior to installation.

But the following two photos show a different perspective.  It's the bare concrete after being cleaned.  We refer to the floor as "a sow's ear" because of the rough, poor finish by the cement contractor.  You can see all of the trowel marks.  Not many basement floors are this badly finished.

From the other direction, it's even worse.  The dark meandering lines all over the place indicate cracks in the floor.  The cracks appear darker because they are still damp from cleaning.  And more rough concrete.  Would you pay your contractor for a basement floor like this?

Yet, with meticulous cleaning methods, drawing on our extensive experience, and employing advanced staining techniques, using Moss-colored stain and water-based clear epoxy from Brickform, we were still able to turn the above concrete into this "silk purse".

We couldn't make the permanent trowel marks disappear (see above and below right), but the marks now only show up when looking across the floor in bright daylight.  We added several more coats of Spartan floor finish in an effort to blend them in. 

The homeowners were happy, and objective parties - the manufacturer, Brickform, and a national trade association, the Decorative Concrete Council - evaluated this floor as "above average in appearance and gloss".  In others words:  "a silk purse out of a sow's ear".