concrete floor theory part 5 - the unremarkable steps to excellence

There are a dozen or so men who are no longer alive, but continue to deeply influence me through there writing and legacy.  The Saints (actual Saints - not the NFL team), business leaders like Peter Drucker, great coaches like John Wooden, often seem to have more to teach us posthumous than most of the living.

One thing Coach Wooden preached that has never left me is that it is all the little things done consistently well that add up to excellence.  One story by Bill Walton comes to mind about when he came to UCLA excited to play for Wooden.  On his first day of practice, he expected to learn deep, esoteric secrets of basketball only to be taught the absolute best way to put on his socks and shoes.  It was always about executing the little things as well as you could.  Nothing was too small to perfect.  

I've worked for years to apply that to element7concrete.  We have a written procedure describing the best way to mop a floor.  Ironically, we love concrete with its imperfections and nuances.  We doggedly pursue the ultimate in artful blemishes.    

Today then we share a trick we use on every diamond polished floor and occasionally on stained concrete floors.  Most concrete slabs have footprints in them if you look closely enough.  Some processes highlight them.  Many installers have no idea how to remove them.  Here is one that showed up last month on a honed and polished floor we did in a home designed by

Stehling Klein-Thomas Architects 

in Fredericksburg, TX.

It didn't appear until after the cream of the concrete had been ground off, exposing the fines.  After focused sanding with a handheld polisher with a pad of bonded diamond abrasives, it looked like this:

The keys are the right abrasives, moving in a way that generates maximum friction without melting the pad and creating "schmear", creating a consistent scratch pattern by hand, and stepping up to higher grit abrasives in larger, irregular blobs so that no lines catch the eye in the finished floor.  All this is probably too technical to be interesting to you so here's the point:  It is all little things, learned in the field over time, codified for consistent company-wide performance, that customers, builders, and architects never even notice that make for our excellent reputation.  We deliver day in and day out because of these little things that are not exciting to read about.  That is the point.  It's about staying on your job when nobody cares to look.  That is where excellence is made.