Why it's worth doing.

There are two things that really drive us at element7concrete.  What drives my work for my team is the ethos of rebuilding the artisan class of America.  What drives our artisans' work for our customers (and what we will discuss here now) is making floors that will still be in use and looking good when we all have grandchildren.

This was punctuated for me recently when I read that last year alone, over 4.6 billion pounds of carpeting wound up in landfills.  That is not sustainable.  And by that I don't mean "That doesn't jibe with our idea of sustainable construction".  I mean that is clearly not a pattern we can afford to sustain.

This past week, we tore out carpet and polished and stained a floor in our local fire department's training room.  The waste of the tear out was substantial, but as I reflect on the job now, I thank goodness the cycle was broken.

 Concrete flooring is still a bit of a niche product.  This project was won because the fire chief had stained concrete floors in his last two homes and knew first hand how clean it is, how easy it is to take care of, and how the imperfections and nuances become the best parts over time.  Because of him being savvy, our town will not have to replace that floor again:  not when my kids are paying taxes, maybe not when my grandkids are paying taxes.  I think that is pretty cool.

Why unicorn ranching is hard.

I once heard (and have often repeated) that most folks ask kids what they want to do when they grow up because they are still trying to figure it out themselves.  Some days I feel the same way, but generally I am stoked to be on this silly mission of mine.  I want to share a little about what is confounding about installing concrete flooring here.  Hopefully you can relate, as I am sure my road is pretty similar to anyone else's, and we all need to figure out why to get up and fight most days.  

Concrete flooring is the cleanest, "greenest", most durable and aesthetically timeless floor I can think of.  The floors from 80 years ago still look great to me.  I don't know how one would ever wear out a concrete slab in a home or store.  Flooding is no problem.  One may even be able to burn the structure to the ground and salvage the floor.  When our customers dust mop or "Swiffer" their floors, they are done: no periodic steam cleaning required, no "schmutz" underneath.  Best of all, I think my stuff is gorgeous.  I just love that I can feed my family making stuff I think looks rad.   

Since we started keeping track, we found that on average 19 times out of 20 our customers are extremely happy with their floors.  Why do you suppose it is that Home Depot, Lowes, or any other big player in the construction industry doesn't offer stained concrete flooring, much less market it? This all stems from the fact the perfect concrete floor is like a unicorn:  Although I can imagine it, I have never seen one and have about given up hope.  

So what are we to do?  First off, we have made ourselves world class in dancing with the curve balls concrete slabs throw us.  There is a guy in my town that has been scoring and staining floors longer than I have been alive, and even he once admitted to me that about 1 in 10 will do something in the process he really didn't see coming.  My response is to geek up:  I read as much from the PCA and ACI as I can, do experiments on my warehouse floor, find the engineers at trade shows and pick their brains, and lurk on message boards aimed at decorative concrete contractors.  People are smart.  If you are not the real deal, and you try to explain away the issue on their floor, they will see your B.S. for what it is.  However, if you truly make yourself into an expert, and you are confounded to chalking something up to "well, it gives it character", then it is what it is.  Most importantly, all that we have learned has allowed us to make first class floors (imperfections and all) out of really sub-par slabs.   

The other part of what makes it work for our company is understanding the customer experience.  When we spend money, we usually do it to satisfy our paradoxical desires for certainty/security and uncertainty/variety.  We want to change our world up a little bit, but we want control over the change.  We want 10 restaurants in our mall's food court, but we want the same style of pizza at Sbarro every time we decide on it.  If Sbarro gave us a triple order of Panda Express food for half price, we would still feel ripped off.  We want sort-of-stale-pizza, dammit.  So, managing stained flooring customers is really tricky.  If some of the time we don't totally know what is going to happen, we really have to set the game up differently. We love the builders we work with, and we want the owners they serve to have a lot of fun with the process.  So, we design the deal to be fun.  I still haven't figured out how to produce that result through more than 6 team members to serve more than 5 customers a week, though. 

Until then, the carpet factories will continue churning out rolls that will work their way into a landfill every 5-10 years.  Wood floors will get wet and buckle, and the coolest tile on Earth will 20 years from now...look like 20 year old tile.  Someday, I hope to devise an experience like Mike Miller (The Concretist in Bencia, CA) creates for the masses.  Uphill?  Very much.  But if the going get's easy you may be going downhill.  For goodness' sake, find something very hard to do that would make the world a cooler place and throw yourself into it.  Even if it is as pointless as polishing concrete.  Go. 

i-n-t-e-r-v-a-l-s

I was reminded again today of the value of working in rhythm.  We human beings are truly designed to create at full throttle, then rest.  Technology and marketing collude to short circuit this, as there is money to be made in grabbing attention, and the coolest tools are best fitted to this task.  However,  we are happiest and most effective when we are not at the effect of that.

Ironically, I am a bit of a fan of both technology and marketing.  I guess I dig it because I value cleverness in general, and those are two arenas where cleverness is attracted and celebrated.  Be on guard, though: we all celebrate Creation or ersatz creation.

A wise protestant once said something to the effect of "all sin is idolatry".  If anyone can make a counterpoint, I will take you out to any extravagant-consumption-based date you can describe.  (Idolators, as a group, like to consume the finer things of this world).  I can't imagine what you have to say.

This is all true but frankly off topic.  My point here is we are to crush it, then sleep.   We are to give it all, then rest.  When we do not do enough or do not rest enough or do not follow the rhythm of do/rest as dictated by Nature, we suffer.  The world suffers.  The ones we love feel the lack of our gifts.  We owe it to ourselves, our best friends and families,  and the world to "bring it".  This cannot happen authentically unless we hide out when it is appropriate.  Nor can it happen when we just reflect without boldness.  It is time to step up or step away.    Thank you.

Against the grain.

About nine months ago, I may have spent an afternoon as the most annoying guy on house slab pour ever. A really neat couple in Llano,TX was building a ranch home with Sammy Lackey, a solid local builder there, and they wanted concrete floors. However, they were adamant that they not be slippery for their dogs' sake (the Bot 3000 COF meter is geared for something other than paw traction).  The saw a picture in my portfolio of a floor we had done with a very rough, hand troweled finish (on the West Coast, I think they call it a sweat finish), and that looked just right to them.  The concrete contractor, on the other hand, had never heard of such a thing.  What's kind of funny is how "unusual things" go over in rural Texas.

Mike, the concrete contractor, is both very competent, and a good guy;  we had worked on a handful of projects together, and I think we started with some mutual respect.

The cast of guys finishing that day was an all-star-team of sorts:  Normally, (as racist as this may sound), there is a fat-ish white guy running the crew, and 3-10 Mexicans doing the actual work.  Since the economy was slow,  almost every "jefe" I had seen in Llano County was working on this job as a finisher.  I don't know what the Mexicans were doing that day.

When I sent the pictures to Mike of the rough finish we were after, and talked to him about it, it was obvious that he wasn't really feeling it.  So, I planned on coming out the day of the pour to teach a clinic on rough, random looking finishing.  When I rolled up, the vibe was pretty tense.  Without exaggerating, there was probably a century of experience finishing concrete between the guys there, and here I come with a bunch of worn-out pool trowels hanging from their handles in a carpenter's box in my truck.  I was going to roll up in a detailed pickup and show these salty old dogs how to finish this slab?  Right.

Two of the guys were acting extra friendly and interested, which indicates that the other 6 were talking crap about me and the Christian within these two was screaming inside about what's right and wrong when folks use there word in a negative way.  Anyway, despite their best intentions, the notion of finishing concrete less than as smooth and tight as you know to do on a "house-slab" was going over like a fart at a funeral.  Hand troweling when there were 3 perfectly good finishing machines on Mike's trailer was equally objectionable.  Ultimately, the job got done, and we may have placed the world's first power-troweled sweat finish.  The local concrete guys were pretty sure that I had ruined the project and that there was not a good chance that the floor was going to look like anything they wanted to be associated with.  However, they knew that I wasn't an idiot or a charlatan, and were therefore curious as to what I was going to do with this terrible slab that I inspired.

Now frankly, when we came back to stain and finish out the floor, it looked rougher than I remember.  The house was framed and dried in and so there was a ton of edge work that had to be done with hand held grinders.   Two days, a couple of sets of diamond tooling and six grinders later, it was really cool looking.  We left the pattern of the "finishing" intact, but we ground off an awful lot of concrete.

We got to finish it out in September, and even got to mimic their ranch brand in a Texas engraving on the front porch.  I really can't wait to pop some Coors Light with the salty old concrete guys in Llano and get their candid opinion about what this project, because (now image this said with a heavy twang "That looks good-I don't care who you are".

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.