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.

 
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.

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!

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). 

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.

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 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.