El Patio
Thursday, March 1, 2007
The backyard patio has been one of our first home improvement projects and has lasted way too long.
We decided to stain the concrete a nice color.
We pulled off some outdoor carpet from the concrete deck two years ago. And that's when we found that carpet glue had been used as a leveling grout and then two years passed. We finally started tackling the removal of that grout/hardened glue this year. We rented a floor sander from Home Depot and learned that they're not so easy to control. I guided the handle as Sinzi sat on it. I did not see such an illustration in the instruction manual...
Then I hand scraped for several hours over a few weekends until nearly all the glue was gone. We left some for, ah, 'dramatic effect' (i.e. sick of scraping). Then we cleaned the concrete up, and waited for morning to stain it. We sprayed on the stain and took on a state of shock to see how orange it was.
The next day it rained a lot and the earth worm decided to wait out the showers on the patio. Then the sun came out and scorched them into the surface of the patio. Removing them removed some of the stain, leaving CSI style outlines where the worms used to be. Oh well. And the following week we top-coated it with a clear epoxy designed for garage floors. The finished product looks good to me (we also installed track lighting).
See the progression from carpet covered, to hideous glue patches, to orangerifficness! 
Posted by Mark and Sinziana 10:20 PM
Labels: casita
