Stained Concrete Austin

Stained concrete Austin post on remodeling old concrete floors.

Thanks for visiting our stained concrete Austin post! In this house remodel project, we wanted to let the underlying concrete be the finished floor. It took some true grit to deal with the mud, the dust, and the backbreaking labor of this job.

If you’re in the middle of a diy project, reach out to us. We enjoy hearing about other people’s projects and sharing ideas. And, if you need somebody, and not just anybody, to help you find a home or get your home sold, we’d love to hear from you! Remodeling is just an occasional diy hobby. We’re full time Realtors with over 30 years experience in Austin real estate.

View of old 1978 floor with a couple of layers of sheetvinyl.

The old 1978 floor had a couple of layers of sheetvinyl. Of course this was not a big surprise. The underlying glue requires a machine to remove. It’s tough. In those days no one considered concrete as a finish floor. So they had no reservations about spraying the floor when they painted trim and doors.

The fist step was to clean the floor and grind off the top layer of concrete. We hoped to make do with our own machine – a Clarke Floor Maintainer, which we use for waxing concrete.

This machine can take a hex-pin attachment, so we rented one from Home Depot. The hex pin took off surface paint and glue, but would not remove the deeper paint that had penetrated the surface of the concrete. It made a whole lot of dust.

The guy at Home Depot loaned us a sander attachment, and we bought a couple of sand paper disks. The sander did about the same job as the hex pin. We tried putting water on the floor to reduce dust, but the sanding disk quickly became coated with gunk and would not work.

We tried a stone grinder machine, but it was not powerful enough to grind down the concrete surface. So, we went back to Home Depot and bought a diamond disk for a hand grinder that we happened to have. The diamond blade was a more aggressive tool than the stones. It took off a thin layer of concrete. We did the whole 2,200 square feet with a small hand grinder. The blade had to be replaced at one point. Then the hand grinder burned up and had to be replaced.

The mud slurry from the grinding had to be vacuumed with a wet vac. This was a hard job in itself. The grinding and cleaning took about 9 days all total.

Close up view of clean concrete floor showing exposed pebbles.

At the time, there was no place in Austin to rent a large diamond grinder, which is what you need to do this job. Today these are available. There is a downside to DIY remodeling – sometimes things don’t work out easily. Polished concrete floors are hard to achieve in a remodel.

The color ranges from gray to tan, and there are some patches where carpet nails had been pulled. A few old leaf patterns are there from the day the concrete was poured. And flecks of stones in the concrete show up, which is nice.