Concrete Polishing

All over the country, architects who design primary and secondary schools are warming to polished concrete. Jim Ward, of Ward Scott Architecture, Tuscaloosa, Ala., is one of them. His firm’s recent project, Big Sandy Elementary School, part of the Tuscaloosa County School System, opened in 2013.

Contractors, construction companies, architects and designers are eligible to submit, and projects are judged on skill of installation, creativity, artistic expression and integration with the overall design intent.

The weak economy does not have to make our industry buckle under price pressures. We've forgotten that polished concrete is already the best bargain in the flooring industry, and what's more, we've allowed the formulaic installation to become entrenched in specifications.

One message comes through loud and clear in any discussion, debate or disagreement about the various types of densifiers used in concrete polishing.

Almost all of them work, with one exception...

This posh campus of office and parking structures, located in the western Los Angeles neighborhood of Playa Vista about one mile from the Pacific Ocean, contains polished concrete floors and board-formed concrete walls and pillars, but that’s just a taste of what decorative concrete has brought to the 15-acre campus.

We all are aware of how important a role architects play in our industry. They are the ones advising municipalities and every type of building owner. As architects learn more about what we can do with a concrete surface they are becoming very intrigued with how much they can do.

The one universal truth about the polished concrete industry is that, sadly enough, there is no universal truth. We don’t agree about what defines polished concrete, what steps are important, or what is the best way to steer the industry.

Ideal for distressed floors with lots of cracks, pits, chips or gouges, this versatile technique can be used to turn a fixer-upper into a masterpiece.

Lately, polished concrete floor care with the use of nonwoven diamond floor-pad technology (instead of bonded abrasives) has been promoted at conventions, conferences, and in concrete polishing articles everywhere we turn. Just how important are these pads to our polishing industry?

There are ways to evaluate a floor for polishing before quoting it. You will need to develop benchmarks (on test floors you’re currently polishing) before you can accurately predict how a future floor will polish and what densifier to use on the floor.

As business owners, as soon as we open our eyes each day, we begin to think and search. Where are we going to find more work for our crews? Besides the usual options of bidding on new construction projects, refurbishing old polish jobs or removing epoxy coatings, there must be other ways to make money with our equipment and skills.

For Martin R. Smith, president of Rockerz Inc., running a successful business is all about the people on your team. “I’m really driven, myself,” he says, “and I like to hire people who rise to the challenge. Personality, to me, is what sets certain people apart.”

When Productivity Inc. built a new showroom in Minneapolis, Minn., more than three years ago, the company chose to top the floor with Artera, a polishable polymer-modified fiber-reinforced cementitious overlayment made by LifeTime Floors.

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.

A “punch list” is the final review of a project. It is usually completed by the project architect and is most often completed after the project has reached a milestone called “substantial completion.” And for a decorative concrete contractor, the punch list is probably the single largest money-losing piece of a project.

ST115 is a new standard for the concrete polishing industry that was adopted in fall 2013 by the Concrete Sawing and Drilling Association (CSDA). The standard explains in detail how to measure the texture of a concrete surface by using a texture meter.

A floor at an Alaskan elementary school honored the natural environment and became art that kids can walk on, thanks to Mapei’s Ultratop PC polishable concrete topping.

Justin Hawkins and his Lincoln, R.I., outfit, Livingstone Studios, sent us these photos of arrangable cast concrete benches they created for the Rhode Island School of Design’s Chace Center.

Our editors compiled a list of some of the newest polishers on the market. This article goes in depth on each of them.

On a regular basis, many of us are asked: “What is the best way to maintain polished concrete?” Is there one method proven to be superior?

In this article, we’ll explore some field testing reviews and compare traditional DIPs (diamond-impregnated pads) to a newer floor maintenance system involving composite resin abrasives (CRAs).

Polishing concrete, not unlike other new industries, begged, borrowed and stole from others in its infancy. Equipment came from the surface prep, stone restoration and cleaning industries, and as one can imagine, nothing was a perfect fit. It is still evolving today, but here is a look at where it came from.