What are you leaving behind?

Everything.  You know you are going to die, right?  Someday (hopefully decades from now) you will not be here and odds are most of your stuff will end up in a landfill.   This doesn't have to be a bummer and it is not unrelated to element7concrete.

To be clear, element7concrete is not what sidewalks are made from.  That's just concrete.  What we are talking about is inspired design, excellent workmanship and timelessness.  These things can resonate for a long time.  We do this work because people need homes, homes need floors, and there is nothing on Earth more durable or less likely to go out of style than polished concrete flooring.  

Back to the butterfly effect of good design.  In his brilliant biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson made the connection between the homes built in what would later be silicon valley and renaissance of computer science there.  Eichler Homes created the backdrop for a cohort that would grow up to change the world and drive the American economy even after they died.  

Good workmanship inspires.  Every well built thing you have touched or seen has made it tougher for you to leave things half-assed.  I can assure you personally that if you focus on how well things are made long enough, you will become a compulsive "fixer".  You may well drive your spouse crazy by repairing things in hotel rooms and public spaces when you think no one is looking.  It is like a disease (albeit a very positive one). 

Timelessness is ironic.  The most "timeless" things surely age, they just do it in an artful way.  I have an old Harley Springer I like to ride when the weather gets warm.   The finish is coming off the cooling fins of the motor.  I could pull the motor and have the cases chromed or powder-coated, but I know she just wouldn't be the same.  So I have grown to love her flaky plating.    

Similarly, concrete will take on stains and chips from abuse that linoleum will not.  However, old masonry becomes charming while more "durable" surfaces do not.  It is the difference between patina and age.  

So, as you go about your work this week think about what you may be leaving behind.  How are you inspiring people you encounter?  What will your artifacts say to our descendants?  Does it matter?  It must! 

   

It's not art if no one is fighting

Hot Coffee is great.  Orange-mocha Frappaccinos can really help you sort through these important issues 

Lukewarm is no good.  Of course, this blog here craftsmanship and concrete and the point is that uninspired work just sucks.  Even God says " 'I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! 16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. (Revelation 3:15-16)

My motivation is pretty simple.  I know that I want to fill my days and get paid enough to feed my family meeting a basic human need in a way that is clever enough to not be done as much as it should be.  People need homes>homes require floors>nothing is less likely to wear out or fall out of fashion than a polished+stained concrete floor.  Out of this clear simplicity, we are passionate to create value in this field.  We aren't cool or lukewarm about our work.  We bring the hot.   

This is where the battle rap starts:

We have character and competence, and not everybody does.  Out of our character, we develop competence.  Out of their poor character, their competence is eroded.  They get distracted, burnt out, fall to drinking, try being a cop or whatever, don't stay physically/mentally/spiritually strong, etc.  

Element7concrete has a local competitor that has been scoring and staining concrete floor nearly as long as I've been alive, and yet compare their work:

with ours:

Our circles are perfectly round.  Our proportions are tight.  Their copy of our design (they didn't try the hard stuff until we got in the game) is lumpy and wack.  Now this is frankly not really tough to do, but our character demands that we become competent to do it correctly, or we don't do it at all.  Most people trying to compete with us do this work because they don't know anything better to do.      

Concrete flooring is inherently imperfect - notice the patch in the photo of our project above.  However, when you can trust your artisans as world-class, the patches can be embraced as a nuance of the material.  If you do not have someone genuinely good doing the work, minimalism becomes half-assed and efficiency becomes cheapness.  As the great American author O'Shea Jackson (Ice Cube) once wrote "If you want it raw now, make the call now...I got it all day, in the hallway

..come on home - holla at your boy".  We'll keep bringing it.

How to clean a polished concrete floor.

Washing a stained and sealed concrete floor is a lot like washing a vehicle.  If you tried to just wash your car with a mop without drying it, it wouldn’t work very well. Your floor is no different.  

For routine cleaning,  you can mop it,  then shuffle around with an old towel (taking up the dirty water) and get it clean fairly quickly.  If you are cleaning a commercial floor and towels seem unprofessional, microfiber mops that start dry and get wet on the heals of your wet mopping work great.  

If your floor is outside, think drive-through car wash.  That is get the dirt into solution, rinse it, then break out your leaf-blower to blow-dry the dirty water off.

If the floor is really dirty, think gas-station-window washing.  You need to get the dirt into solution and then squeegee the water to a wet-vac and just use the mop or towels like you would use the paper towels at a gas station.  Remember the windshield analogy - it's all about the squeegee.  If you scrubbed your window, and used a shop vac to pull the water off, it would require a lot of paper towel action.  If you are a pro with the squeegee, you can get it fully clean in the time it takes your road-tripping companions to buy chips and drinks.   

Soap is a great invention, and the best soap for your finished concrete floor is surprisingly cheap.  The goal is generally to clean the floor without leaving a film or removing the finish, so mild or highly diluted detergents are best.  I recommend anything that starts with “Neutral” or “Neutra-”  from a janitorial supply store - NeutraClean, Neutral Quat, etc.  If the smell of Thyme is more appealing the 3M smell, try Seventh Generation,.  Here is a link that I'm not set up to get paid on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Seventh-Generation-Disinfecting-Multi-Surface-Lemongrass/dp/B0033UJ5QO/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1351189944&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=neutral+disinfecting+cleaner   

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.

Bold, intentional responses - concrete floor theory part 4

So you are building a house with concrete flooring, and to no one's surprise a mistake has been made.  Maybe the plumber put a pipe in a hallway instead of the bathroom (photos of that next week), or an electrical conduit gets misplaced.  That is a straight up construction error that needs a bold response.   (See last week's episode for when bold responses are not called for)

Last week, I made it sound like we do this when the customer hasn't really embraced the basics of concrete flooring.  I may have even said that "If their Walmart conditioning is strong and they are freaked out - we then need to make the objectionable part the best part of the floor."  That infers that bold responses are not needed with cool people.  Not true.

The customer who commissioned us for this floor was extremely cool.

The electrician and the contractor who poured this slab foundation (our team just did the scoring, polishing and staining here) are cool too.  But being human, they make mistakes, and the electrical conduit that was to be centered under the kitchen island ended up about 2' off the mark.  

Luckily the owner had an interesting piece of limestone with a small fish fossil that seemed to fit the kitchen really well.  So, we cut out a rectangle to accommodate it within 1/16" and mortared it in with anchoring cement.  We overfill the cement and consolidate the material well by handling the trowel or putty knife with a very shaky hand.  After at least a few hours, hone it down with a 100 grit resin bond pad on a handheld polisher and then rough up the fossil with a needle scaler.  

It's been a couple of years since this was put in, and I'm told that the fossil has intrigued and impressed dozens of  house guests so far.  Since the floor has our unique 505 finish, it actually looks better now than it did in 2010 even with no maintenance yet.

Proper reactions to not finding a unicorn - concrete floor theory part 3

The perfect concrete floor is like a unicorn - I can imagine it, but have never seen one.  Concrete slabs are handmade with every re-do leaving clues.  Human effort and the material converge with on the pour day and the nuances are frozen in time.  This is why for a customer, commissioning a concrete floor is more like going to a concert than going to Walmart.  You have to abandon your consumerist conditioning a little to enjoy it.  It is not a mass-produced product for you to buy in a plastic clamshell package.  It is both an event frozen in time and a dynamic process.  

So we are going to have “imperfections”, and we know it going in.  The owner's response then leads our response.  If they are cool, the remarkable nuance starts to seem cool.  If sanding it out looks better, we just do that (often without a discussion).  If their Walmart conditioning is strong and they are freaked out - we then need to make the objectionable part the best part of the floor.  So, there are four responses to encountering them.  

1. Get excited.  The leaves that fell into your slab were a gift from nature.  The footprint from the man running the trowel machine is an artist's signature.  The raccoon that created a blob on the floor that won't react with acid stain now is reminding us that human's are not alone in this world.

2.   Cover it with a rug.  Honestly, concrete floors with no rugs tire the body and make for spaces with bad acoustics. The whole point of concrete floors can be rugs.  If you like carpet, and opt for rugs over polished concrete, you can clean them yourself with a pressure washer outside on the driveway much better than a professional cleaning company can clean carpet.  If your style changes, you can donate your rugs.  Rugs can be re-purposed indefinitely - Folks in Haiti would love the crappiest rug you can find.

3.  Sand it out.  Especially if the floor is sanded with a big machine anyway (we process every floor with diamond abrasives), we can often just sand it and fade it out.

4.)  Do something bold and intentional.  This is an article unto itself, and most of the best examples of this I can think of were never photographed.  The sad truth is, it is hard to balance doing work with this talking about work.  When we get really busy, the blogging drops off, except now I have been making a point of putting content out weekly regardless of how much work we have coming in.  Something is suffering and I will go fix it now.  Thank you for reading.

The space between the lines - concrete floor theory part 2

Surprise.  Our brains squirt dopamine on themselves when we encounter Novelty.  This is part of why:

• many women will go shopping today.
• many men will watch football today.
• I work with concrete.
• you are browsing the internet now.

The chemicals won't last for long, so we keep looking at new stuff until we have had our fill.

"One question still remains - how much more art can we take" - Fat Mike of NOFX  

Too much though, and we want to go home to Familiarity.  Familiarity puts serotonin into our blood, and is why I felt so delightful riding to Austin after a catfish dinner at the Hill Country Cupboard.   

This is also why we love music we grew up on.  Though it may be really great music, at this point the novelty is gone, and we are there listening because it feels like a blanket right out of the dryer.  This is also why we love concrete flooring - the first floors were stained in the 1920's and it hasn't gone out of style yet.  Therefore, I hope/pray/expect much of the work we do to be there when I am long gone.

Good design creates good feelings.  A well designed space balances Novelty+Familiarity well.  Architects and designers work hard to do this in many dimensions (the "bones" that create the spaces, the lines of the furniture, how light is used, etc.).  In contrast, the floor is easy:

More novel finishes demand less patterning to stay appealing.  The photo below was a floor we did in Fredericksburg for a couple with remarkable taste.  Anne selected a color I frankly didn't "get" at first, and she was totally right.  

Less novel finishes with less patterning make great backdrops for bold art and furniture.

The photo below was a floor we did in the Hyde Park neighborhood in Austin.  It was a remodel, and there is some subtle mottling in the floor, but overall we shot for a very muted effect to backdrop her art.

Less novel finishes with no patterning or remarkable art end up making unremarkable spaces.  I don't want to diss anyone by putting up a picture to illustrate this, but chances are you could go out to your garage and see what I mean.

Bold patterns with bold finishes can end up overwhelming.  We made this countertop for a home in the AHBA Parade of Homes 3 years ago, and frankly it was overdone.

Once in a while, it works though.  This floor+countertop was done in 2007 for an art and furniture store in Marble Falls, and everything was turned up all the way and the net result was great:

Thank you for reading. The big idea to take away is balance Novelty with Familiarity.  Take care.