Bob:
Hey, this is Bob and Ryan with Surface. Renew. We’re here to talk to you about concrete staining Little Rock AR. Today. Last week, we talked about some of the questions our customers had and this week we’d like to build a little bit more on that. One of the things that we hear about is I love the durability of a polished stained concrete, but I don’t like just a plain gray. So Ryan, I know we got some great options. What are some options that we have for those customers that want to add it? They want to tie in their local, a decor to what their floor is.
Ryan:
And everybody’s different. Bob, Doesn’t like the gray for his concrete staining Little Rock AR. I personally like the absence of color. I like the gray because it shows the colors of the region by showing the colors of your stone and the colors of the sand and the region. And I did, I did my whole house actually, and just plain polished stained concrete,
Bob:
But yours exposed. Yeah. As I was going to say, that was exposed aggregate.
Ryan:
You see all that. But you can still add color with concrete staining Little Rock AR even at that stage where you’re rocking your sand won’t color, but your Portland does. But the absence of the polished stained concrete with the, with the rock you can, with just a cream Polish, you can add a color too. And we have multiple coders. I think we have 15 to 16 different colors ranging from light grays to medium Browns, dark Browns, greens, blues greens, blues yellows. It’s important to note that reds do turn orange ish at times, no matter how heavy you put it on all the way to black and black just really just turns into a, like a real dark gray. It never really turned a solid black
Bob:
Yeah. Concrete just won’t absorb that kind of color to make like a pure black that’s really not a possibility with concrete staining Little Rock AR.
Ryan:
The only thing you can do then is do integral color where while the copies being made at the concrete plant, you add pigment to the concrete itself would from, we did a house Brown like that. And that looked really, really good.
Bob:
Well, and that’s what some of the Walmarts have done to keep the color of the floor.
Ryan:
Oh, Walmart’s and Lowe’s and home Depot as they’re doing now, they’re Walmart’s using like in our area of rock, they’re using a cotta color for some of the stores and a gray and the other store.
Bob:
And of course, one thing we should talk about here too, even though we’ve probably beat this horse to death, but it’s so important is that when we talk about concrete staining Little Rock AR, we are not talking about what Joe Smith with the pickup truck is rolling over to your house in with a bucket of stain and some sealer that is actually staying on top of your concrete. It is somewhat penetrating . It’s not actually getting down into the concrete always, but generally is doing some penetration, but the way they’re getting colors in, they’re rolling sealer on top of that stain color with their concrete staining Little Rock AR. And it looks great. It’s a wonderful option. It’s just not nearly as durable, which is why Ryan and I got away from it years ago. And we went to diamond polished stained concrete. What’s the difference in what we do versus what I just described?
Ryan:
Would you just describe that that role on sealer is a sorry, that was a customer calling as a roll on sealer is a sacrificial coating, meaning that your chairs, your dogs, your pets, your 10 year old kids with metal Tonka trucks can scratch that.
Bob:
And they do cause what’d we say just the shoe walking across a dirty floor is like what?
Ryan:
And it, it doesn’t take any time at all in your high traffic areas that sacrificial coating, if you don’t have it redone every six months to a year, either waxed or resealed and the steals sealers, or it’ll take you out of her house for a couple of days, because it’s such a strong smell, what we do, even if you’ve already got a concrete staining Little Rock AR and sealed floor, we can fix it. We come in, we’ve got machines that weigh up to 1800 pounds. We come in, but diamonds on a machine cut all that mess off. Or if you start from scratch, we come in and we open up the floor, we go to a 200 grit and then we add the color then, and then we go up to an 800 grit or 1500 or 3,500, whichever you want to, you know, however shining you want it, we’re actually closing the surface of the concrete up.
Ryan:
It’s a mechanical closing it’s instead of putting a physical coating on it, we’re actually closing it with diamonds and it makes it bright, shiny reflective. Or you can do a matte shine too by stopping at 400. We do put on a penetrating sealer. We put it onto a microfiber, but it’s not topical, it impregnates the concrete, and then we run a burnisher over it, which heats it up and pushes it down into the concrete. So you can’t take a razorblade with just the pressure of her 150 pound man and scrape any of our stuff off. It is in the concrete floor.
Bob:
And the other important thing that we do as part of our concrete staining Little Rock AR process is Ryan mentioned the mechanical piece of hardening the concrete. We also use a chemical to harden. The chemical actually penetrates into just the very top of the concrete and actually does a crystallization process that actually tightens the pores between the concrete. So between that and the mechanical polishing, you have a floor that’s much, much harder and harder and more difficult for things like spills and dirt and debris to penetrate the concrete and cause problems down the road. And also lots of the color as well, and does a great job of locking in the color. Whereas what you’ll see on some of the, the stain and roll floors that we’ve talked about, you’ll kind of see, we call it walking off. If you go into a restaurant, it’s a great example of this, where somebody has done a rollout and stained and sealed concrete, is that wherever there’s heavy traffic pattern, they’ve worn that sealer way. And that’s a different color in that wear pattern versus against the wall.
Ryan:
Yeah, I guess the walls looks great, but in the middle of the floor, it’s just back down to bare concrete or grease stains or whatever nastiness they can’t get out of the concrete cause the sealer is gone. So therefore the concrete staining Little Rock AR gets damaged in all the foot traffic grease coming in and out of the kitchen, all that stuff goes right into the concrete and then it has stain and you really have to get after it and grind it, you know, up to a quarter inch off to get past all that.
Concrete Staining Little Rock AR | What About Maintenance?
Bob:
Yup. And that kind of leads us into another great topic. When we talk about the two is the kind of maintenance that’s required for our stained concrete versus the maintenance that’s required on other floors, such as some people love to wax their floors, they love to wax and buff them to get them shiny. And then we talked about also the stain is the rolled, sealed concrete, how that can walk away on you. The big difference between what we do and other companies do is that once we’re done, yes, maintenance is required. It is highly recommended. And we had a school. We did five years ago that hasn’t done maintenance. The floor still look great, but really, really recommend coming in. And, and we don’t have to go. We don’t have to start from ground zero, but we come in and we just kind of tighten up the pores again re put a nice seal on the top, take care of any scratches. It just lets the floor from even wore down on top of those, correct.
Ryan:
That is the high maintenance, you know, doing maintenance where you have to do it all the time. It’s like a home Depot or Lowe’s or up a restaurant really needs to do weekly, monthly maintenance which maintenance isn’t expensive. Then they can actually, we can sell them the pads and the proper chemicals to do the nightly cleaning and monthly stuff. They can do that themselves. But like in your home, if we come back every year, every two years to maintenance your stained concrete we’re about 80 cents a square foot to come in, and it’s a half a day project we’d come in except your floor. The focus on maintenance is usually just on the high traffic areas.
Bob:
And it’s a great insurance policy because in the home, I can tell you firsthand while Ryan’s had it longer than me, but I’ve got, you know, has got big dogs too. I think we talked about this last time, but I’ve got dogs that just run through my downstairs where it’s at, and it’s just simple maintenance for the concrete staining Little Rock AR. I mean, it’s nothing to keep up with that floor half the time. It’s just the dust mop that I run over it. And when you do have to clean up though, one, one thing that’s really important is using the proper cleaner. That’s one of the biggest recommendations that we give, particularly commercial clients is use the right kind of cleaner cause the wrong cleaner is almost instantly going to remove a lot of the mechanical and chemical. Yes,
Ryan:
You at your floor with an acidic, cleaner, or a strong base cleaner. You want, you want a neutral pH cleaner that and we can get you that it’s do a mirror Polish. They’re local here to the state of Arkansas. We like everything to be in state. You know, we’ll venture out for some things, but we can we get you set up with all the maintenance stuff you need or you can just have us come do it too. Like we said, it’s 80 cents a square foot. That’s a lot cheaper than completely restoring your floors if $4 a square foot or so.
Bob:
Yeah. In fact, we did a cost study, which is available one of our websites that talks about the different options. Like well now the thing is LVT. It’s basically it’s VCT that looks really, really nice luxury vinyl tile, and it does look nice. I kind of make fun of it, but it, it does look nice. You know, you got a rolled vinyl tile. He can put down, you can go really expensive in, into a lot of the stone, which we’d take care of on the maintenance side as well. But if you look over the lifecycle of a floor, you have to perform maintenance on a floor. So once you factor in what it costs to install, then when it wears out how much it costs to re-install and add to that, what you need to pay to try to get the maximum life out of your floor. Polished stained concrete is like by far heads and shoulders way above every other kind of floor option that you have out there in terms of economics.
Ryan:
And the maintenance on polished stained concrete is way cheaper than waxing strips and waxing floors,
Bob:
Which is another big mistake we see people make is they got a great floor and they start waxing and sealing that thing instead of just bringing us in and doing the normal maintenance that you would do on a natural stone floor that protects it and extends the useful life of it.
Ryan:
Once again, wax is a sacrificial coating. It shows scratches, but the problem, another problem with it is it traps grime and the cleaning crew that you’re hiring from down the road that comes in and cleans your floor tonight, throws another thing, a wax on it. He just whacks him at the state Capitol. There’s nine kinds of dust, debris, there’s other people’s hair and stuff that makes that wax.
Bob:
They’ve waxed some nice dirt and everything else in that floor. So anyway, that’s kind of our take on the concrete staining Little Rock AR. If you have any questions or anything, our website is surface-renew.com or you can catch us@salesinfo@surface-renew.com. Thank you.