Make it last.

Since we went into business many things have changed, but the ethos that put us into business has not.

We want to make the most durable, timeless floors on the planet.  Everything else will wear out or go out of style before the stuff we make.  That's the goal.

I was reminded of this when I took a break from revising our systems to walk to my favorite coffee shop, Main Street Coffee, in Marble Falls, TX.  The coffee shop was a bar before that, a restaurant before that, another bar that, and a builder's office before all that.  The builder was named Autumn Group Homes, and when I stained their front porch, I threw in some leaf engraving for free.

The leaves are still there, the job still looks great, and I walked out thinking how lucky I am to feed my family making pretty things.  The point isn't me, though.  It is restraint in design.  If we are all about us, we may do the boldest thing possible to elicit the most praise from people for our work.  It's when we think about the world outside us, that we are drawn to the simple, subtle things.  Things that endure timelessly.  This is how we make the world better with what we learn.

Profoundly American

The other night, I went to fetch a fifth of Tennessee whiskey on a Harley Davidson wearing Levi's and Vans and it occurred to me.  I love Americana.   

I cringe a bit when I hear someone say "...what made America great..."  I well up a little for the same reason.  What makes it all so good is how heterogeneous it all is.  It is the harmony in the chaos.  It is hodgepodge, the mishmash and the jumbalaya.  It is the opposite of" what [one isolated thing] makes America great".   

Few things are more American than 21st century concrete.  Though the Romans had a magnesium based mortar that turned out to be incredibly durable, Portland Cement is the New World Standard.  And while the formwork of European architects is great, decorative concrete as the world knows it is an American invention.  

My favorite niche of chemically stained concrete was pioneered in the construction of the Awahnee Hotel in California.  Built in 1927, the architects casted against wood, and created intentional rust stains that look elegant and timeless today.  This was neither strikingly engineered or painstakingly executed.  It was practical (fire resistance is good), well done, and endearing.  Just like the the Vans on my feet, the Levi's on my legs and the Harley under me.  Just off enough to be right on.  

This is all of it.  The perfectly imperfect material.  The soup that becomes like a stone in a fossilization of the materials and men that mix and place it. 

I can't tell you how thankful I am to feed my family making cool stuff out of this material.  I am pretty glad you took the time to read about the work here, too.  To the men that work for me, I try to preach home the value of putting some spirit into the work and the material.  I guess the best I can do for you here is to chide you a little to do the same.  

When we do something in concrete or with acid staining, every nuance is captured.  It’s obvious with our work, but likely no less true with yours.  Work like it really counts.  It must.  That notion, is more American and lasting than any of the landfill fodder discussed above.  

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.