driven to dust

The scene:

What element7concrete is all about is taking a lowly material (concrete) and applying as much creativity and raw human energy (spirit) to it as possible.  Sometimes it's researching materials and best practices, sometimes it's just vibrating a form thoroughly and hard troweling the slab. Though countertop fabrication is a tougher place to create value and fans of our company (our countertops are frankly expensive compared to our floors), having complete control allows for a better expression of this.

Yesterday, we found ourselves back out at Land Art on Hwy. 71 just west of Austin.  We had transformed the old funky grey floor months ago, and now it was time to finish out the counter we had poured last week.  Things came to a head though, when the sometimes dirty nature of our work ran against the efforts of the cleaning crew.  They are nearly ready to open, and there we are ready to grind out our slurry, control fibers, and router our edges.  It all came to a head around 11:00am when the owner had about had it.  I was truly sorry for the noise and dust (turns out a $2000 Ermator S26 vacuum isn't completely effective when using handheld tools on vertical edges, etc).  However, I am terribly thankful we were allowed to go on and add to the mess inherent in construction for the same reason I get up and do this everyday:  We have a chance today to make something awesome.

The realization:

That's the whole point.  Take your day, and even though your back hurts, your eyes are burning, and you are developing acne under your dust mask, MAKE SOMETHING AWESOME.  All we ever have is this moment (I would like to have had two more days to make dust in Land Art to really do it like I'd like to) to do our best.  If we relax until something awesome we can make comes to mind, and then doggedly work until it exists, we are pretty happy regardless of our physical conditions.  As soon as we take our eyes off the prize, one point of discomfort after another will pop up until we are miserable.  If you have a Bible and care to read it, check out Hebrews 12:2.  There is a pretty good example of enduring what you don't want "for the glory set" before you.

just because you can, doesn't mean you should

Living and working in a small town has it's advantages:  not fighting traffic too much, forgetting to lock up a truck or your shop rarely bites you, you get to know your kids' friends' folks, and if you dedicate yourself to really mastering a weird niche and are not a jerk, you eventually get a good reputation to enjoy.  Some days, people will even call you and say something like "I'm building a house for a lady who saw______ in a magazine, and I know if anybody can make that out of concrete it's you."  Stuff like that will inflate your head if you are not careful, but it still feels good to hear some times.

Anyway, I got a call today from a builder who was interested in concrete that looked like wood.  Not such a bad idea at first blush for a theme park, a porch in the flood plane, or some other such situation where the look and texture of wood was desirable despite intense food traffic or submersion.  However this was a countertop job.
"Why not just make it out of wood?" I asked.  He didn't rightly know.  Point is, there is something in most of us that is attracted to gimmicks like a largemouth bass to a spinner bait.  Sure, no fish looks like that, but the bass tries to eat it anyhow.

I thought about the project out loud with the builder and told him that if his owner really had her heart set on something really unique that looked like wood, he ought to work with Thom Hunt from bigbamboostudios.net and have him make something out of zoopoxy (an epoxy often used for fake trees and what-not in theme parks and zoos).

After I got off the phone I started thinking about where was an appropriate place for fake wood.  Disney World made sense, as the fakeness of the whole deal is part of the fun, I think.  The more I thought about it, the firmer I became in my conviction.  John Ruskin was right:

When we build, let us think that we build forever.
Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone.
Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for;
and let us think, as we lay stone on stone,
that a time is to come when those stones will be held
sacred because our hands have touched them,
and that men will say, as they look upon
the labor and wrought substance of them,
“See! This our father did for us.”

—John Ruskin

Timeless design need not be something unique to projects with heavy involvement by an architect.  We all know deep down when things are wack.  A worn out wooden walkway works just fine, and is frankly more charming than a perfectly sealed faux wood concrete piece.  Now that I look back on it, that is the essence of why I love concrete flooring.  It's honest.  It's exposed. It's imperfect.  Human bodies worked it as hard and as skillfully as they could at some point (maybe many points).  Like our bodies (though hopefully not our hearts), it get's harder and cracks.  It never goes out of style, and it never wears out.  In the last analysis, honesty is timeless; timelessness is honest and everything else falls short. 

a spiritual quest for beige.

We get to make a lot of really cool stuff.

 I mean, there are much easier ways to make enough money to feed one's family than slogging it out in the Texas summer heat, crawling around with a saw cutting patterns into floors or making concrete the hard way (buckets of sand, bags of cement and our trusty little Imer mixer) only to have to bear the highest level of "hand-holding" in all of the construction trades and the most brutally competitive market for decorative concrete in the world.  (Texas was referred to in Concrete Decor Magazine as  "the starvation market").  I don't remember the last time my work day didn't end with me smelling like a homeless man.  My big, pointy nose gets filled with concrete dust regularly, my joints hurt most mornings, and we risk tens of thousands of dollars every day.  Good news is, I really don't think I could be happier!

How rad is it to make a living making stuff you think is great with guys you like for awesome people?  God bless America, eh?  But enough about all that - I bet you are not reading this because you care about how I smell or how my nose feels for that matter.

What I hope to share here is a reminder that while edgy concrete wall panels and ornate medallions in floors look cool in our portfolio, what it is really about is the day to day consistency.  I haven't written here too much recently because I have been maniacally focused on building systems that make the day to day work of the artisans of element7concrete better and more consistent.  And to that end, we are maniacs for beige.

"There is no beige acid stain" - Brandon Adamson at my 2nd day of training at Engrave-a-crete in Florida.  It's early 2006, and I have committed to going into the decorative concrete business, but I am still working my union job, and taking every seminar in the nation I can before moving to TX to take over the company I have ran for the last 5 years.  Brandon went on - "Sealer should be re-applied once a year or maybe once every two years."

This all sounded like crap to me.  I lived in Las Vegas at the time, and most things were beige.  Re-sealing annually?  Sounded like a white elephant for sale to me.  I knew my own concrete driveway at home hadn't been touched for at least 4 years and while it was grey and totally unremarkable, it was not something I had to deal with.  There had to be a better way.

The project photographed above was just finished this morning. It was about a year and a half old, ugly grey, and covered with oil stains and tire tracks when we started.    We used nothing other than Kemiko acid stains, lots of little tricks, an amazing penetrating sealer that will go at least 10 years before needing anything- there is no paint, "dye", or anything else questionable used. If that is not beige, I don't know what to call it.  Most important to me,  I will bet that when my little kids are out of collage, this thing is a good cleaning away from looking a lot like it did today.

Note: Engrave-a-crete makes great tools and is a really positive force in our industry.  I mean no disrespect to Brandon, his family, or their company.  I just know that if you tell a stubborn old Kraut like me crap like that, I will find a better way.

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!