Gaye Goodman

Va-Voom! A New Stripper Hits Town

2009-04-22T21:54:24Z

We have discovered a great floor stripper which may open up new jobs for you and will certainly make the whole process somewhat easier. My crew really dislikes re-doing other people's botched floors. However, in the current economy, those are the jobs we are getting and we are only too glad to have them!

One of my favorite custom home builders called me in to see the floors of his own home which he had stained by his house painter before he knew much about acid staining. The painter actually did a fine job on the floor prep and staining, but he was given bad advice on which sealer to purchase. He was sold a "urethane enhanced acrylic" which was meant for wood floors. It looked beautiful for the first few months, but began to flake and peel in the traffic areas for the next nine years. This builder has two active children, a frantic dervish-dog, and an artist wife who paints in one room.

I did some test stripping in a corner of his study. I have found it does not pay to base your stripping estimate on a test done on the flaking areas, so I selected a secluded spot where the sealer appeared completely intact. I thought I was simply dealing with a cheap water-based acrylic. We often use a janitorial wax stripper on these with good success. That did not touch it. Next I tried a strong citrus cleaner, letting it soak for 20 minutes, then scrubbing hard. It only penetrated in a few high spots. When my client put me in touch with the local sales outlet for his sealer and I spoke with them, it was clear they had no idea how to remove it.

I sure didn't want to turn down this large job, but the client wanted me to remove the impermeable sealer and replace it without removing the stain from the floor, since he was in love with the look of the original. That meant that sanding or removing the cream layer of the slab was not an option. I recalled that my friend and staining colleague, John Rodriguez, had been urging me to try a new low-VOC stripper which he had been using lately. He had provided me with some half-pint sample bottles which I had stashed in my truck and forgotten about.

I got out the bottle of thick, gooey Newlook Easystrip 1000 and tried mixing it with warm water before applying it to the floor. It did not seem to mix with water at all, so it must be meant to be brushed on full strength. It appears a lot like liquid latex rubber. I spread it on thinly and waited 15 minutes. Voila! It ate right through that tough sealer and darkened the concrete. John told me it could be sprayed on large areas or rolled on with a paint roller. It remains thick and must be scraped up with a wide razor scraper. Once most of the glop is wiped onto old rags, the residue can be scrubbed away with a TSP solution and a black pad on the rotary buffer. (The web address for this product is www.getnewlook.com).

I bought a five-gallon pail and we set to work on the builder's house while he took his family on vacation. We soon found that by applying Easystrip 1000 full strength to a dry or even a dampened floor, we were wasting a lot of product which sat on the surface and did not penetrate well. There was a lot of scraping involved and many spots of old sealer remained. It took us four hours to do one bedroom this way.

Remembering that we were working in an extremely dry desert climate, we decided to ignore the instructions and mix the stripper 1:1 with warm water to increase penetration. Once it was stirred in a bucket, it did not want to mix with the water, but looked like Chinese egg drop soup. We poured this on the floor and spread it out with a rapid circular motion using a Doodle-bug pad and holder. After some brushing the stripper mixed with the water and turned into something which covered the floor evenly with a shaving cream consistency. We let it soak in for 15 minutes and could tell by the even darkening of the floor when it was ready to be removed. We gathered most of it together with a large floor squeegee and wiped it onto rags. A subsequent TSP scrub removed most of the residue, but we did two such scrubs to remove every bit from edges and corners. The second bedroom, done in this manner, took us half as long as the first.

This house had nice white enameled baseboards in every room. We always mask these with three layers of tape when stripping floors. We use a medium-tack tape along the very lowest edge to the floor, then another layer goes on with the masking plastic when we use the masking machine, and finally we try to "waterproof" the lowest edge by putting a band of two-inch colored stucco tape on top. Invariably we find that fluid strippers like citrus cleaner tend to puddle against the walls and creep up under all these layers, holding the stripper against the wall, so the walls get partially stripped also.

I warn my clients in advance that they will probably have to repaint their baseboards. A wonderful side-effect of using a thick stripper like Easystrip 1000 is that it does not flow. Most of the stain color in the floor was also left intact. This might be a fluke. I have never before stripped sealer and had any color left to speak of. When we removed our masking after restaining a few gray spots and doing a post-stain scrub, we found the painted baseboards in pristine condition. That seemed like a small miracle to me!

Soon after this experience we had another remodel. The clients removed their living-room carpet and wanted us to stain the concrete floor underneath. There were the usual wide bands of carpet pad glue in snaking lines bordering the walls. We were able to get a good portion of the glue off with a citrus cleaner soak. We found that the Easystrip (which is really made for paints and sealers) did not remove glue on the first pass, but after most of it was lifted by means of citrus scrubbing, it worked very well to loosen the remainder of glue which was deep in the pores of the slab. After some wire-brushing on these areas, we removed more carpet pad glue than we had ever been able to do before.

Newlook also makes an Easystrip 2000 which is meant to remove epoxies. We have not tried that yet, and sincerely hope we will not have to.

The Labyrinth

2009-02-18T21:03:46Z

Last spring we were hired by an Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Albuquerque for a job which was completely new to us. They were redesigning an outdoor area which was surrounded on three sides by the old church building. The fourth side featured a wrought iron gateway which gave onto the city sidewalk and could be locked. The centerpiece of the enclosed patio was to be a walking labyrinth.

A labyrinth is different from a maze in that there are no walls and no tricky dead ends. A labyrinth has a clear starting and ending point. One enters and walks a convoluted pathway slowly until reaching the center. In the center one can pray or meditate, then walk back out the way he came. The church planned to hire a young man named John Ritter to lay out the design and consult with the artisans. His company, called Paxworks, has created labyrinths made of brick, stone and even mowed grass, but this would be his first design done with acid stains.

The labyrinth selected was one John has designed based on a Medieval French labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral, only smaller, containing five circuits to the central rosette. Our slab was to be nineteen feet in diameter. I downloaded the design from John's website: www.paxworks.com and had Kinko's copy it onto a piece of clear plastic. I had to convince the church's renovation committee that we could do the job and show them what it might look like. I made several 8x10 photographs of floors we had done in various faux textures (a marble look, a granite look, and a calligraphic look). When I placed these under the plastic with the labyrinth design over it, they could get an idea of how their patio might look.

The church committee selected a medium brown marbleized look. They had a nice circular slab placed and troweled to our specifications. I also requested two small sample slabs be made from the same pour which we could use for color sampling. These turned out so nicely that they were later set into the grassy border as stepping stones to the entry of the labyrinth. The committee agreed that we should do the labyrinth outlines in a dark walnut color, rather than black, as it would be more harmonious with the background.

My assistant and I spent two days cleaning and doing the background staining. Even though it was perfectly troweled, the slab was somewhat resistant to our stain. The weather was unseasonably hot and the slab was not shaded by trees until late in the afternoon. We used thin plastic laid into the stain to create a marbleized pattern, but had to scurry fast to lay stones down on each section, since it seemed to dry instantly in the sun and wind. This lifted the plastic which we needed to keep in place to create a mark. We were disappointed with our first staining and returned early the next morning when the slab was cooler for a second staining. This time we got better pattern and felt lucky that our work area was surrounded by sunken drainage areas filled with handy river stones. (Photo #1 of second staining)

The next day we scrubbed off the residue and John Ritter arrived to lay out the design. He had a small box containing a few templates and a clever sort of plate with a central spike which he taped down in the center of the circle to use as a pivot for his compass lines. The rest was done with mathematics and years of experience. I saw him do it, but I could not fathom how he laid out the concentric spirals without getting hopelessly confused. In a few hours he had the entire design drawn out for us in pencil. He wanted to see how we would mask it off, so I handed him a cup of liquid latex rubber and showed him how to brush it outside the lines with a two-inch chip brush. (John is on the right in Photo #2).

Outlining the design took all of us the rest of the day. The next morning we tested our dark walnut color and applied it. The central rosette was the most detailed area to outline and stain. (Photo #3).

A breeze came up every afternoon and caused the trees around the slab to drop small flowers across it. As they decomposed they left darker brown marks which we could not remove from the background stain. We decided that this was God's input and we would do best to welcome it as an "added layer of complexity."

We carefully scrubbed our walnut stain the next morning using small brushes and a sponge, before pulling up the latex rubber outlines. The latex rubber makes a crisp line and an impervious resist but it inevitably pulls up some background stain color in the smoother areas. We used a diluted brown stain to re-color those areas. The stain only needs to sit thirty minutes on retouching to even out the color. (Photo #4 shows Gaye cleaning off some retouch stain).

We sealed our work with four coats of an extremely durable solvent-based acrylic sealer which Dayton Superior makes for parking garages and gas stations. It is called J-35 Tuffseal, a high-gloss, single component and UV stable product. We rolled it on using a short-napped phenolic core roller cover made for adhesives. The sun was so intense by 10:00 am, as we finished the first coat, that we got some stringing of the sealer. We knew we would have to wait until early the next morning when the slab was cool to apply subsequent coats. We got lucky while applying the last three coats of J-35. The surrounding trees had finally dropped all their flowers and the wind died down. (Photo #5 shows the finished labyrinth).

Due to trees and the weather, this job involved more steps than I anticipated, so we did not make a profit on it. However, it is a great addition to the Faux Real portfolio. We became friends with John Ritter and expect that he may call on us to help him stain some future jobs. He said that this labyrinth was much less complicated and quicker to execute than those made of brick, mosaic, or stone. John began his career as a banker, doing his first labyrinth as a courtesy for his church. He enjoyed it so much and received so many requests for others around the country, that he quit banking to become an artist. The labyrinth field is still expanding, as more churches decide to incorporate meditation practice into their other forms of worship.

The labyrinth was really fun for us to do. It convinced me that in a "down" economy I might do well to take on more special logo or design jobs. If I bid them correctly, most could be completed in five days with one or two helpers.

Gaye's new video--Coming Soon!

2008-10-21T20:41:58Z

If you have ever wished you could land really big jobs, twenty, thirty, fifty-thousand square feet or more, but were worried about the risks and didn’t really know how to play the game at that level, then this post will be very good news for you.

My newest video, called "Acid Staining for Commercial Spaces," will soon be on sale through Bridgeworks Publishing at this website: www.bridgeworksstore.com. We will be sending out a notice by e-mail to all our Forum subscribers and to our mailing list of clients. This is only being sold in DVD format. It will be useful to professional stainers, architects, interior designers and ambitious homeowners who want more detailed ideas for their DIY project.

I had several reasons for making the new video. I wanted to update my earlier video, "How to Stain Concrete Floors" with some new techniques we’ve adopted to make our work speedier and more efficient. I also wished to discuss some important business matters, which I did not do in the first video. So I decided to make this a film primarily for professionals. I include the kinds of problems which arise on very large jobs, as well as those involving the removal of curing compound, enamel paint, latex overspray, and many other things that stainers often encounter, even on a "new, clean" commercial slab.

Last September, Robin Peters and Caleb Thomas, from Dreamscape Design, flew from Illinois to Albuquerque for three days of filming, bringing most of their equipment. They rented a large moveable boom on which to mount the camera so we could get nice shots from above of the entire crew at work. We managed to film all the segments I had planned in three days. We started in my office at Faux Real, and then moved to the completed Albuquerque International Balloon Museum to shoot the beginning and ending of the script in which I talk about job planning and special designs using stencils.

The third day of shooting covered the entire process of cleaning, staining, and sealing a commercial floor in all its stages. I had been consulting with Alex Leonard, the developer of a new community in the mountains east of Albuquerque, called Nature Pointe. He was constructing a large clubhouse to be his community center with a workout room, billiard and game rooms, kitchen, offices, and a lounge entry equipped with two large fireplaces. Everything except the basketball court was to be in stained concrete. Alex planned to have me train his crew to do the staining, but I offered him a very good deal to have our crew prep and stain the floors, in exchange for his cooperation with our video shoot. This benefitted both of us.

We had completed about one-third of the floor staining before the film crew arrived, so we had clean, finished floors on which to demonstrate sealing and final waxing. Other areas were stained, but not sealed, and still others were completely raw. Alex gave us such a clean slab that we had to throw blobs of enamel paint down and "fake" some of the shots we needed to illustrate problem clean-ups. One thing we didn’t have to fake was what happens if someone spills battery acid on your slab! We found a deeply etched rough patch by one column which did not take our stain at all, so I was able to demonstrate how these spots can be colored with penetrating dyes and then faux-painted to match the existing floor.

I was surprised to discover that a one hour long video takes about ten times as long to write and edit as a twenty-minute video. I also found out the hard way that editing cannot be done using long distance phone calls and e-mails, if one is particular about the "look" one wants. In the end, Dreamscapes did the rough editing and then shipped me the hard drive with all their work on it. I was able to take it to a professional editor nearby, Edit House, whose owner worked side-by-side with me through the final editing, music and titles.

Much of the narration was done as a voiceover during the video and still shots. I recorded this at the studio of one of my workers, Ryan Martino. Ryan only works on my crew occasionally. His real forte is as a sound engineer for musicians. He did a great job and is a sound perfectionist.

My publisher and I decided that we really should include a Bonus Section on the DVD to cover some of the business and insurance matters which arise when you decide to bid on public jobs. Adding this delayed us by another few months. We filmed the Bonus segment as an interview at the headquarters of Bridgeworks in Albuquerque. I also assembled over twenty still shots of nice commercial floors which we have completed in the past, and set them up as a Slide Show on the DVD so that you or your architect can show that segment by itself to clients, as an example of what can be done with acid staining.

We shot the video to be "product neutral" with few specific brand names mentioned. We are posting a list of brand names of all the supplies we used in the video (listed by chapter), which purchasers can download. Decosup Inc. at www.decosup.com is carrying the same line of acid stains that we used in the video.

In conclusion I will say that I included everything which I would have liked to have in an educational video when I was starting out in this business. It is complete, but moves along quickly. You can return to whatever chapter you need to review, thanks to DVD technology and your Menu button. I feel you will soon gain a boost in confidence and be able to reap new profits from your copy of "Acid Staining for Commercial Spaces." I look forward to your feedback on the DVD. It is in production as we speak and we expect it to begin shipping by the end of October.

Happy staining!

Latex Rubber with no Kinks

2008-04-11T18:47:46Z

I don’t know about you, but most of the contractors in the city of Albuquerque are starting to feel squeezed by the building slowdown which has been in progress around the country for several years now. We used to have the luxury of turning down requests to acid stain backyard patios and garages, preferring the working conditions and artistic scope of indoor jobs. Now we have to settle for whatever small jobs we can get.

As you may know, the Southwestern style of building involves a great deal of adobe, most of it an imitation latex product called Sto, which is full of coarse sand grains and looks like adobe, but which easily absorbs our acid stain. We can etch stain out of real adobe with an acid-water solution, but not with Sto. This means that before patio staining we must protect adjoining house walls from the ravages of our stain. We’ve been using colored duct tape pressed down along the bottom edge, but it is hard to get it to adhere well, especially if the stucco is very grainy.

When I was in New Zealand working in Roy’s studio, he introduced me to a great product called liquid latex rubber. Various companies produce it and sell it in cans to artists who wish to create their own molds for casting. This is what Roy was using it for. He would go to a beach when the tide was out and paint on several layers of the viscous yellow substance, allowing it to dry in the sun between coatings. Soon he could peel the entire mass up starting at one corner and voila, he had his own homemade texture mat for stamping the surface of freshly laid concrete to replicate whatever stone surface he’d selected.

We found that it made an excellent resist material on our art boards.

You can apply it to a stained and cleaned surface or an unstained one – it will completely block any acid stain which you apply to the board. When you want to remove it, you start at the edge and peel it up easily like a thick rubber cement. The surface underneath will be pristine and ready to receive a contrasting stain color or clear sealer. The liquid latex rubber leaves no residue.

Here we are applying it to the central petal of a flower design (which we will later dye violet) and around the outer edge of two petals into which we will brush blue dye.

You can order liquid latex rubber through www.tapplastics.com. They call it Mold Builder.

We had a large patio job to do and rather than struggle with the colored duct tape, which always ends up lifting off before the job is done, I asked the homeowner if we could experiment with some liquid latex on his walls. We applied about four square inches as a test and left it for two days, then peeled it off. There was a very faint line where the latex had been, but it was not due to any damage to his stucco wall—we had simply removed a layer of dust and dirt!

Before scrubbing and staining the patio we applied two inches of latex all around the lowest edges of the walls. When it had dried we put masking plastic over it using the usual masking machine loaded with tape. The tape adhered well to the latex since the bumpy sand grains were smoothed over by the latex. We still used colored duct tape to pin the upper edge of our masking plastic two feet up the wall. Our masking remained up for the four days it took us to scrub the patios, stain, rescrub, and apply two coats of masonry sealer. Since then we have found that the latex rubber requires an overnight dry time if the temperature is around freezing. In the summer it will dry in an hour. I am thrilled to have finally solved the stucco problem which had been plaguing us for 3 years on outdoor jobs.

Slaving Away in Sunny New Zealand

2008-03-02T19:33:35Z

(Photo 1 is of Roy and Jose in their garden).

I apologize for announcing my new blog, then being slow to begin it. I recently returned from a five-week trip to spectacular New Zealand. Since my floor staining business is slow in December and January that is when I schedule my vacation trips. This year I went to see Roy and his wife, Jose (spelled “Josie” in American English) Snowball, who live in the countryside about an hour north of Auckland. They invited me to stay in their rambling home, which Roy calls “the mausoleum,” and treated me like visiting royalty. December and January are full summer in the Southern Hemisphere, so we were able to experiment for hours in Roy’s open-air studio.

On my first visit two years ago we worked on landscape boards which Roy trimmed down to about 2 feet by 4 feet. (Photo 2 is of Autumn Vista, an art board we did).

While our experiments were curing we could take side trips to any number of spectacular coves and beaches near Roy’s home. This is not a bad way to work! (Photo 3 is of Gaye taking a swim break). I also spent three weeks on my own touring the South Island and staying in inexpensive hostels – the best way to meet other travelers.

Roy is an old hand at concrete placement and stamping and has been doing decorative acid staining ever since he took one of my Albuquerque seminars five years ago. He knows a great deal about chemistry and manufactures his own stains. His website is www.quantumacidstains.co.nz.

For studio work he has developed a super fine-grained microtopping which can be thinly troweled onto concrete backer-boards and stained in multiple layers. If the first coat of topping is tinted gray and allowed to dry and a second coat of white is applied very thinly over it, you can see swirling trowel marks showing through the upper layer of microtopping which is translucent. If this is then stained with brown, the color will be nicely mottled instead of solid. Photo 4 is of an oval tabletop Roy made and stained brown, laying pieces of dried grass into the wet stain.

One can continue adding “veils” of translucent microtopping and staining them until a great deal of depth is achieved. When Roy applies his solvent-based sealer the result looks very much like fine polished marble. Photo 5 shows a blue and brown tabletop Roy did in this way.

Acid staining as a floor finish is virtually unknown in New Zealand, so clients wanting interior floors are rare. Local stainers have to use acid stain in other ways and are finding that garden furniture, large planters, and garden wall plaques are more often in demand than flooring.

New Zealand has a temperate, lush climate and homeowners spend more time outdoors than in. Roy and I visited the studios of four of his artist friends and I was impressed with the variety and ingenuity of their work. I will report on their work in future blogs.

Roy is specializing in creating outdoor furniture of polystyrene glued and sandwiched between two concrete boards so as to make tabletops which are lightweight, yet durable enough to withstand heavy rains. He has been experimenting with central motifs using stencils of local fauna such as the “Leafy Seahorse” shown on the tabletop in Photo 6.

It is a rare joy to be able to collaborate in the studio with another artist (since egos and opinions about art often block consensus). Roy allowed me to make decisions about composition, while I followed his lead on what chemistry and layering might best achieve the look we wanted. We worked on multiple boards at a time so that the serendipitous events happening on one work could then inspire a new direction on the second or third board. Certainly we had some failures and created some messes, but nothing that could not be resurrected by another layer of Roy’s miracle microtopping! In Photo 7 I am staining some boards on the floor of his studio.

It is invigorating to take time out from the business of staining floors and repairing floors to look around and see what other concrete stainers are doing. I returned to the U.S. with new energy and a more expansive view of the possibilities inherent in our craft.