Show me a picture, and I'll cut it into your floor.

Custom home builders love us because of how we improve the experience for their customers.  One way we do that is by cutting a medallion in the foyer based on anything they already have and like (contrasted with selecting from catalogs or samples at a store).

It's less permanent than a tattoo, but we still careful to pick something that translates well to concrete and is timeless.  The floor we recently finished for Dave and Vicki Shurman in a home by Reven Builders is typical,
This one was based on a coat rack.  They had owned this coat rack for years and just always seemed to feel better after looking at it.  I think a swirling sun is about as primal as you can get, and the engraving process is not wholly unlike the petroglyphs of the Native American tribes of the Southwest. Vicki gave Todd (awesome guy on our team since 2006) this photo as something they liked and would like a medallion of:

This picture was passed onto me on the second day of the project (winter 2010 I think), and I knew that it would be best to translate this on a finished floor after the sealer had really cured out.  So, we finished the floor and let the other monkeys ply their trades, planning to put it down when we came back for the final polish. 

Now in July, the house is about done and it was time to do the final polish and install this medallion.  Putting a Ermator S26 vacuum on the tools, and having an great team cleaning up on my heals made working in a finished home a breeze. I dug the hand made look of the coat rack, and wanted that to translate to the floor with little deviation in the swirl, but better rays.   Rather than sandblasting or using a needle scaler, this one was cut free-hand with a 4" grinder so the texture of the engraving accentuates the design.

The best part, though was Vicki saying "That is exactly what I hoped for".  I thought to myself "You saying that is exactly what I hoped for!"   

 I am really thankful to be able to feed my family making stuff I think is cool for people I like.  Thank you David and Vicki Shurman, Larry and Randy Reven (I don't know Mrs. Reven, but she must be a saint).  

All's well that ends well - Correcting Construction Errors Episode 5

We did it!  It was a long day of grinding, scrubbing, head-scratching, re-staining, and rinsing, but we did it.  The floor described earlier in "Avoiding Construction Errors" now looks pretty sweet.  Like so many before it, the floor is actually better now than if everything would've gone as we hoped it would have.

Because of a mishap with my iPhone, and the SD card for my camera doubling as a vehicle for an audiobook I wanted our interns to hear, I have no pictures of the corrected floor to share here now.  Photos of floors in homes without proper walls or trim stink anyhow.  I know it sounds like I am trying show the bright side of "the dog eating my homework" and I might be.  I will try to get some proper pictures when we do the final polish and will post them to http://www.facebook.com/pages/Element7-concrete-design/105210402870801
(please click "like" there if you haven't already) and put them on twitter as well.  You can follow us there @element_7.

What we did to fix it is hone the floor with bonded-diamond-abrasives (blocks of metal and resin with little bits of diamond in them), re-stain it, rinse it, densify (apply a chemical that makes the concrete hard and dust-proof), and then come back the following day and finish it out with a stone oil/paste wax.  The stamping done outside by the concrete contractor is not the best I've seen, so it's not likely that'll make it into our portfolio, but the interior floor is first-class.  The low spots of the floor kept a bit more of the dark walnut stain from before, and the overall texture is buttery smooth now.  There is good color movement and the finish is refined, yet rustic.  Like much of work when it's right on, it looks brand new and 100 years old at the same time.  Sorry if that seems a bit self-promoting, but after all the blood and sweat poured into this one, I am really stoked with the finished floor.  

Avoiding construction errors.

They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Today we find ourselves doling out that pound with our HTC machines and a lot of power and diamond tooling.

The builder following this little link on our website could have saved today and tomorrow's work for us.

http://www.element7concrete.com/builder_awareness.html

Behold the culprit:

This was one of three drinks we found on the framing when we started the project.  Who knows how many more were in the house and spilled on the floor so far?  I would guess about 5 or 6 based on the spots on the slab.  If you zoom in, you can see one in the room behind the can.

The point is unprocessed concrete is like a big hard sponge, and chemical staining is like that black light they use in scary evening "news" shows (Dateline, 20/20, etc.) that shows all the gnarly stuff on the bedding of a hotel room.  If the concrete is to be stained without a lot of grinding, stuff like spilled sodas is going to show up.  Now, if you root through the insights given on element7concrete.com, you'll read about how much we like leaving the cream of the concrete intact, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.  So we are slogging it out in the Texas heat, grinding a floor that should've been protected a bit better.

Now to be fair, the builder on this project is a good one.  He and I have worked together many times before and I don't blame him entirely for the mistakes.  Concrete flooring is a great way to create value when building, but it's frankly a pain for the GC to have to protect the floor as much as the have to.  Most importantly, the communication has to be better.  The link given will soon have an easy to print sign in PDF format that can be hung around jobsites where stained concrete is specified.  Until then, please contact us for a copy of this so we can all build efficiently and keep moving forward.

How to fix our schools (?)

I really hope this is a bit of a snowball that grows with input from others.  There is a serious problem in our country, and it won't be solved by one person with a plan or by us ignoring it.  So for goodness sake, please consider this idea, and either promote it, rip it apart, or just tacitly pass it along.  If we don't discuss it, our education system will continue to deteriorate and our country will decline and ultimately crash.  We have nothing to lose by trying to fix this.  Who knows, maybe we can find legitimate hope and make something better for once.

OK.  So here is the first proposition.  From what I gather, the state pays some $10,000/year/student for education.  Merit-based-pay sounds good on paper, but it's problematic in reality.  What do you suppose would happen if we took the $60,000-$120,000/year that could be spent in a traditional school, and allowed parents to pay that to a certified "home schooler" (with the same or more rigorous standards teachers are held to now).  Of course there would be oversight, but don't we have administrators already?  Wouldn't that kind of income and freedom to really help kids grow attract great teachers (or maybe realistically keep the great ones from burning out and leaving)?  How well does the feedback system of the amazon.com, zappos.com, the app store, etc. work compared to the current ways we evaluate teachers ?  This might be great or it might be dumb.  Please share your thoughts and push the snowball.  At the risk of sounding dramatic, the stakes here are pretty high.  Your input, from a completely different plan, to a simple post on Facebook to attract attention to the issue is the only way we can fix this.  There is no knight to ride in and save us.  Let's get busy!

Correcting Construction Errors - Episode 4

Regretfully, I still don't have photo's back from the Rick Burleson Job alluded to in a previous episode, so here I will share a recent adventure at Double Horn Brewing
http://www.doublehornbrewing.com/
This whole project was correction of construction errors, as the building was originally a laundromat, had probably half a dozen cold joints, plumbing trenches, and holes and was a generally haggard 50-some-year old slab.  It was the Keith Richards of concrete floors.  The worst part was a combination of slabs in the floor with about a 2" ridge.  More on that later: let's start at the front door.

Months after the interior floor was finished, I got a call from the builder about an issue with the front door.  Apparently, the doors couldn't open right, and the ridges between the three slabs in 5 feet ahead of the front door (just past where we finished our work) was flagged by the inspector for not being wheelchair accessible.  Now, grinding an inch of concrete off is no small task.  It usually doesn't look too great, either.  So to deal with all of that, I cut a leafy, barley-inspired (It's a brewery after all, and the idea struck me about three beers into a night of celebrating April 2011 as the best month in our company's history).  I acid stained it green, then installed a thin, stamped overlay to mitigate the ridges and half covered the leaves with the brown polymer-modified mortar and distressed it back for a good gradient of colors.  Really representational art generally looks cartoon-ish to me on a floor, so I try to keep it a little abstract and variegated.  I sealed it with a solvent based acrylic sealer and took the photo above moments later.  It should mellow a bit over time.    

Details vs. Altitude

If you ask my team what 90% right is, they know to answer "wrong!".  In our work, the details are actually pretty big.  The problem this causes an entrepreneur is that there are potentially infinite details to consider.
Attention to detail in the technical work is easy to get in the habit of and set standards for.  After all, when you are done, it's there to look at.  Things get trickier when you start considering creating customer experience, establishing stewardships for you people, creating a brand, and manifesting a social change.  The magnifying glass that made you the the great studier-of/wrathful-god-of the anthill gives you a very distorted view of your dog.  The elephant is incomprehensible through it.
  
Altitude is clearly the answer.  Backing up, zooming out, getting the Google Earth view, that is clearly paramount to orientating ourselves to lead.  But we know broad strokes alone will never do.  Some areas clearly need to be cut in with the smallest brush and detailed.  Challenge is, we have about 17 waking hours today (tops), families that need us, bills to pay, and obligations to meet.  We can't possibly do it all.

The answer is simple and brutal.  The only thing to do is to blueprint the day and then stick to the plan.  This means there are many things we will have to say "no" to if we are to say "yes" to things that are truly more important.  The three options you have are:
1.)Take the time to make a list of all the things that could possibly be done, grouping them ala David Allen's GTD, and then have the discipline to stick to our commitments of working in uninterrupted blocks of time to knock it out.
2.) Lower your standard and quit caring
3.) Go insane.
Now, go. (not insane - choose #1 for goodness' sake)  

Faith in Education

I have read a lot of useless crap in my 20-some-odd years of literacy. I have also read a few things that have positively touched my soul.

Steven Pressfield wrote an amazing little book called "The War of Art" about how Resitence tries to keep us from bringing the best within us to the world. The incredible lessons of that book came in terribly handy this week as my faith in the mental and spiritual side of my work was tested.

Our year started off a bit slow and expensive, and we have been just flooded with great projects lately. Our internal systems of job expense tracking, material management, and project notes are really evolving now, but are nowhere near what they out to be for me to leave town amid 4 big projects. Nevertheless, spring break and the second annual Concrete Decor show came up, and Shelly and I had planned to attend for months. I knew I had to go. I have always known the real value creation in our work comes from our specialized knowledge and our network of fellow artisans, but knowing that and stepping away from business for a week when things are finally really cranking are two different things.

So we kept our faith and went. Did things run perfectly in my absence? Of course not. However my team did rally to make some raving fans, and nothing was really ruined. Most importantly, I was able to have amazing conversations with guys I have looked up to in my industry (Mike Miller, Tom Ralston, Rocky Geans, etc.) and meet some new people to really learn from (Dru Blair, Nathan Giffin, Thom Hunt, etc.). Back to the Pressfield reference, I found that that just before I found some real nuclear fuel in a conversation, I would be confronted with a fire to put out back home. When I pressed through Resistence's efforts to keep me from growing and contributing at the highest level, I would then be rewarded with a pearl of wisdom, or a real reason to run the good race. In the words of the good prophet Greg Graffin "I seek a thousand answers, I find but one or two/I maintain no discomfiture, my path again renewed!"