Staining The Top

You may have read some of my recent posts where I have been making and polishing a concrete counter top for an outdoors kitchen. The untreated counter top came out white in color. The plan all along was to stain this counter top blue, white ingredients instead of grey were used in the pour with the idea to enhance the final blue color.

The stain was not cheap. Because of the rarity of these materials here, I had to order a whole gallon of stain which typically would cover 400 square feet. Of course, we only needed 20 square feet. After the purchase, my client has actually discovered how to create her own blue stain, but now we can save that experiment for another day and another post.

You can guess that I was worried about staining the surrounding tiles etc blue, so we tried to cover up the rest of the kitchen the best we could. This process taught me an important lesson in that I now know duck tape does not work nearly as well here as it does in the rest of the world.

 

These photos are of the first few coats of acid stain. Applied with a spray bottle, each coat was added by simply spaying the pieces evenly.

As you can see, the colors were not actually appearing even. Some areas took the stain more than others.

The variations in the cement were still evident, which actually gives the pieces character.

The sides were not changing color much as the stain runs off before it gets time to sit and absorb. We think the polishing had a lot to do with the stain not taking as well as it would with rough concrete.