Profile of a successful project.

My team and I recently completed a 4450sf stamped concrete project and it could not have gone better.  Here are some counterintuitive things that may have contributed to our success:

1. Use cheap concrete. Johnny Maldonado of Epic Concrete made the call to just get a 5" slump 3000 PSI mix over lots of steel.  This is wise because a huge house slab will usually crack because of a lack of substrate preparation or tensile strength rather than a lack of compressive strength, and high performance mixes tend to set up faster and less predictably than these.  Also, welded wire mesh is less expensive than "fatty" concrete and can impart tensile strength towards the top of the slab while the heavier steel bears the engineered loads towards the bottom. 
2. Two big crews.  Epic Concrete had at least 10 guys to place and finish the concrete and Element7concrete brought 12 to stamp it.  Both of these jobs are hard work, and the stamping requires a high attention to detail, so having a fresh set of guys to take over and finish strong is worth the labor costs.  You only get one chance to really do it right.
3. Two separate crews.  Sometimes the things that make a guy good at placing a lot of concrete make them bad at decorative work.  Similarly, the attention to detail that the element7concrete guys have makes them bad at big placement jobs.  Put negatively, we are slow and they are sloppy.  Go sloppy first and finish slowly and it is very good.
4. Pray, tithe, and give thanks.  At the end of the day, 40% or so of this game is luck.  Nobody gets hurt, nobody woke up sick, the weather held, the bleed water evaporated at just the right time, the pump didn't break, we all just got really lucky.  We are all lucky to be here.  Make great stuff and enjoy your days.  Thank you for reading.

Please replace me with a robot.

This is one of the coolest stories I have come across lately.

http://innovation.uk.msn.com/design/the-3d-printer-that-can-build-a-house-in-24-hours#scpshrjwfbs

One main reason I work in the decorative concrete industry is to create strong middle class jobs.  So, I find the the part of the article where they address the social concerns of innovation most interesting. The idea that a rising tide does anything other than raise all ships is ridiculous.  Any good tool frees us up to work more creatively and efficiently than before we had it.  I guess the only negative thing about innovation is that by removing the constraint, we may become lazy.  That is, if we don't have to work, some of us will not work.  Some of us work best when we are free, though.  Am I all alone caring about any of this though?

How I stay passionate through rough weeks.

Some days I feel like a hammer - this past Thursday I was more like a nail.  Here's what my left hand looks like as I type this out:

The point is though I think I am the luckiest man alive to feed my family with this work, it is not all wine and cupcakes.  Even when we don't tear up our bodies, this is very strenuous yet tedious work.

I once heard that there are production guys (they go fast, but are sloppy), and detail guys (they do great stuff, but go slow).  To sustainably compete, our guys must be super-efficient detail guys.  Ask nearly any of our customers - we tend to roll clean, and knock out great jobs quickly.  One has to cultivate a massive energy level, a good attitude, an ability to move fast and still keep a sharp eye and high standards even when tired.  What is the secret?  We really, really, care.

Care about what?  To be sure, people can be more or less inherently careful.  Some people don't care about anything (the world that comes to mind for such a guy is inappropriate to write, but it ends in "-hole").  We attract careful people, but what keeps us careful and pulls us back is THE WHY

• Our mission to the market:  Every year billions of pounds of carpet and other floor covering end up in landfills.  Every other flooring option will wear out, burn, rot from water exposure,  out or go out of style before a polished concrete floor by element7concrete.  Everything other than element7concrete flooring is future garbage.    
• Our mission to our workforce:  80% or so people hate their jobs and they should:  many jobs are seriously disconnected from the process of creating value for other human beings and people fell into them for the money. I've personally had a job that paid really well for what I did, but was frankly unnecessary to society.  I felt quietly bad about it, and it took me awhile to figure out why.  Sadly, millions of these jobs exist in our society, and the lives of the people filling them dwindle away.  On the other hand, our guys go home most days exhausted but proud that they made something awesome with their day.  The fact that these beautiful structures and surfaces are made directly for people they meet add to the meaningfulness of the work.
• Our mission to the world:  The ripple effect of creating great physical spaces could be greater than we realize.  The effect of creating meaningful jobs is more obvious and may ripple out further.  Who knows - but it is definitely worth building systems around to make more of that.

So my hands are tore up.  My back hurts.  I even have a black eye from running into a 2X6 (another story).  But I am stoked.  I hope you are, too.  If not, message me directly; we might need your help with something that matters.

3 things to watch out for when using color hardener.

All tools do more damage than good without competent hands around them. (Imagine a crazy moron with a Skil Saw).  Some materials are the same.  

In our part of Texas, Color Hardener is woefully underused.  When used correctly, it imparts  permanent color to the top of the slab and makes the slab harder. Here are 3 things to watch out for:

1. The wrong color.  Color charts should be taken "with a grain of salt".  This is appropriate size for this metaphorical grain:

NEVER INSTALL COLOR HARDENER BASED ON THE CHART WITHOUT MAKING A MOCKUP FIRST.  

2.  Under-application = wasted money.  If there is not enough material on hand or if the finishers don't realize how much really needs to be broadcast into the slab, the color hardener will end up somewhere between the fines and the grey cream on the surface.  That is, you will not end up with any color other than the natural grey, and the money you spent at the decorative concrete supply house will be completely wasted.

3.  Lack of education + color hardener = bad finishing practices.  If the concrete finishers are not ACI certified or have no clue about the chemistry of concrete, odds are they are doing things that make the concrete much weaker than it is engineered to be.  Add color hardener to that and you will likely make it worse.  You can tell a guy to let it wet out before floating it, and you can tell him not to overwork it or to apply it at 50sf/bag or whatever.  But if he doesn't have the understanding of what is happening at the molecular level, he will not be as able to improvise as conditions change to create great concrete.  If the concrete is going to be covered, you can get away with some bad practices.  If it is to be a finished surface in a custom home, the guys had better know what you are doing.  

 

Take it off.

Your floor may be wearing bad clothes.  It wants to be stripped naked and tanned so badly, you can almost hear it crying out.

Here is a little house in Granite Shoals that is getting nicer one surface at a time.  It started off with 3 colors of tile from the early 90s.  From some points you could see all three.

We pulled 3 crews together to get this house masked off and all the tile out by noon on the first day.  Here is a shot of the kitchen before we started grinding:

To keep our artisans safe and healthy, we grind wet whenever possible.  It's messy, but the concrete dust stays out of our lungs that way.  Notice the tile pattern persists even as the rocks in the concrete are exposed from the grinding.  We have found that no matter how much we grind, the concrete is a different color where it can "breathe" through the grout.  Here is a shot of some wet grinding:

What nearly all stained concrete floor installers are taught to do is a bad idea.  The industry standard is to somehow lay up a layer of plastic over the finished floor and hope that the customer maintains it.   Plastic scratches; homeowners can't easily be taught how to fix the floor; installers can't afford to come out every time it is scratched; and concrete flooring is supposed to be hassle-free, right?  So, what element7concrete does is chemically harden the floor, polish it with diamonds, and finish it with stuff that goes into the concrete rather than on top of it.  The result is a floor that is not too shiny, super-durable, and really easy on the eyes.  This is before trim and staging, but you get the idea:

What's cool is that for $4/sf this homeowner has something that will never wear out, go out of style.  Interested?  Call 830-798-2717 for a bid.  Thanks for reading.

Mopping doesn't work - this does

One of the best parts of concrete floor is how easy it is to clean - with the right approach.  If done wrong, it is pretty frustrating.  Check out this funny (cheesy) little video about the perils truck-mopping.

Stay Stoked, My Friends

I find marketing fascinating, but here's a dirty little secret: they don't want you feeling fulfilled.  If you are fulfilled, you are not parting with your money - you are not looking to do anything.  You are fulfilled.

What's this got to do with concrete?  Well, when we go to work with you, we try to create the opposite experience.  We want you to appreciate the value added.  We want you in a state of gratitude.  We are truly more interested in your collaboration than your money.  We still need your money at the end of the job (we pay our vendors and feed our families with it), but this is all a lot more fun from this other perspective.

Out of this spirit of abundance comes all sorts of cleverness.  Last night, I went to check out a very special project overlooking Lake Travis for Hausman Homes.  I was there to address the owners concerns about a stain, and the builders concerns about the texture of the slab (it was finished roughly in anticipation of grinding but lightly sanded after clarifying what the owner really wanted, which created an interesting "dimpling" of sorts).  

I discovered another cool use of low-end materials:

The builder has done dozens of homes with these "2 by 6" floors.  To be clear, the stairs are 2X12's, but upstairs is all tongue-in-groove pine.  It is cool because there is no sub floor (these go right over the joists).  The floor is strikingly rigid.  It polishes up surprisingly well.  But what really got me was the shear simplicity.  

The point is, this might just seem half-assed to the habitually hungry.  The way the marketers often work us is to subtly peel back our scars so we want to buy their salve.  It's done subtly - if you knew they were doing that, you might respond violently.  But purchasing happens most when pain and urgency intersect in a space with no other perceived options.  There is so much of this bombarding us, we become numb to it, but we may find ourselves conditioned anyhow.  Such conditioning makes us want 6 step solutions when 3-steps are better.

So I leave you with this.  Get grateful.  Think of how blessed you are to breathe right now.  You have hands and feet and a brain that can read this.  When they make you feel horny and railroad that to sell you a car, decline.  Make stuff that lasts.  If you have to buy stuff (floors are a hard purchase to escape), buy stuff that doesn't go out of style.  Make today great.