Concrete Polishing

The owners and designers of a new Harley-Davidson dealership near Boston are revved up about the unconventional, highly varied appearance of the renovated building’s polished concrete floor.

The ins and outs of floor grinders on the market today.

How long is a set of diamonds supposed to last? Or more to the point, what kind of square footage can I expect out of a set of diamonds?

We all wish that we could tell our customers, “Screw you! I did the work. Pay me!” I know that in my career I have gotten just about every excuse in the book as to why I wasn’t getting paid for my work. By its very nature, the decorative concrete industry that we love so much allows customers to play with our money.

Williams and Witherspoon brought their brands — the Serena leisure apparel line and Draper James, Wither­spoon’s Southern-flavored women’s clothing label — to Neighborhood Goods in the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas. The store is billed as a “new kind of shopping experience, with brands that will rotate in and out,” the Dallas Morning News reported.

The polished concrete industry has seen growth, especially during the past three years, that is both encouraging and depressing. Whenever one has been part of an industry since its birth, he tends to be a little territorial. So, when change occurs, especially if it's not in one's own best interest, one often gets protective and possibly a little jaded. This doesn't have to happen.

Polishing concrete on a tropical island may sound like a dream job, but there are some challenges to working in this environment. Brian Chafins is a project foreman at Preferred Global, where he maintains production levels on flooring projects and manages job installs.

Diamond tools, and how they’re used, can make the difference between a profitable polishing job and a not-so-profitable job. So how should contractors select tools that are long lasting and deliver what they want? Read on.

If you are truly committed to service, not just the initial sale, then you're not through when you're done.

I was recently asked to troubleshoot issues on a polished concrete floor that failed to show vivid color, even after all the usual right steps were taken. It was “The Case of the Disappearing Color.”

When Concord Aviation Property LLC wanted a polished aggregate surface for president Jack Roush’s private hangar at the Concord Regional Airport in Concord, N.C., they ultimately called upon the services of Eric Wayne Inc., a full- service commercial and residential concrete contractor with offices located in Davidson, N.C.

It’s a game of inches. That’s the cliché heard about baseball, and often about other sports as well. And why not? It’s a saying that rings true and also applies to decorative concrete and polished concrete, where precision matters down to the millimeter, let alone the inch.

While dyes have experienced an increase in market share in the colored concrete industry over the past few years, it's not unreasonable to say they've enjoyed an unmitigated bull market within the polished concrete arena.

Thin coatings that can be polished work wonders on new and old floors, but applying them requires knowledge and skill.

Prepping a concrete floor for polishing is one of the most difficult tasks we face in this industry. We cannot be aggressive like we can when prepping for a coating system, because there will be no coating to cover up the deep scratch patterns. We must take care to remove the surface materials while causing as little damage as possible to the concrete. We must be aggressive while being cautious.

Decorative concrete overlays, stampings, fountains and countertops created from scratch. And the best part of all was that the majority of the work the artisans created are to become a permanent working part of Walla Walla County Fairgrounds.

One of the major issues that I have noticed in the decorative concrete industry is that most contractors in our business do not seem to have any respect for each other. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part this statement is true across the board.

Polished concrete as a finish is reliant on the concrete substrate to be in good shape to provide the end user with a beautiful and durable finish. Owners don’t like blemishes and amazingly the worst issues seem to happen in the main entranceways. Here, I’ll address the most common issues in order of their likelihood of happening.

The time will come when a general contractor, architect or another flooring contractor will ask you to bid on polishing floors in a new construction project.

In the 1990s, when concrete polishing took off in the United States, silicate hardener/densifiers were rarely used. Now, a concrete floor is not considered properly polished if densifier has not been applied to rejection.

In Southern California, grinding and polishing concrete that was placed 20 or 30 years ago is fairly common. However, burnishing concrete that’s more than a century old is a rare task for any contractor.

In this Tooling section, Concrete Decor magazine focused on walk-behind models, handheld models, edgers and other tools that can be helpful to decorative contractors on small and medium-sized jobs.