Color Your World: Colored Polished Concrete
There are so many ways as to how you can achieve giving your concrete polished floor the color and design you desire for it. Among the coloring options includes common colored pigment application, chemical or acid staining, dye and tints that you can apply on your concrete polished surface. Adding on the desired color a pattern of your choice will finish up the look that you want for your polished concrete floor.
The color pigmentation option used to be the most common application used popularly before. Its process includes mixing the pigment to the thickness of the concrete and its topping layer. This is often used in conjunction with the honing process except that during honing, the pigment quantity needs to be lesser than when it is used on normal mixing. Pigmented colors are available in powder, liquid and granule form.
Color pigmentation works when these ultra fine pigment particles which are fine solids, disperse throughout the matrix of the concrete. It is featured in the dry shake feature and can be applied as a cement and sand hand cast onto the pre-hardened concrete surface. The process where the color comes off is through a monolithic topping formation.
The chemical staining, more commonly known as the concrete acid staining, is lately becoming more popular than the pigmenting option. The material or component in this option includes metallic salts mixed with a slightly acidic, water based solution. The acid is responsible in opening up the dense concrete surface, which allows the metallic salts to seep into the slab and react with the hydrated lime found in concretes compounds.
Unlike your usual idea of dyes and tints, the dyes and tints for concrete polish purposes are actually more opaque and remain on the surface of the concrete more than the acid or chemical stain. That means this coloring type is easier to handle and is actually often used to correct and repair results from the chemical and acid staining process. The color of these dyes and tints gives off more color options and are more vibrant than the other coloring solutions mentioned.
Painting or surface coating the concrete polished floor is probably the simplest concrete coloring method offered for the process. In this option, the contractor is only required to paint over the concrete slab’s surface after it had been sealed with a sealer completely. The output of your concrete polished floor will all come down to how well you can maximize the different methods given as suggestions.