Sitting on my Back Porch

It's a beautiful Saturday morning and I'm sitting out on my newly remodeled back porch drinking a cup of coffee. The caffeine hasn't quite kicked in yet, so words are coming a little slowly at this point - and myt yping isn't toog ood, either. ;-) But I'm excited because it's so nice out here now and I thought I'd share a few pictures of what Jack and I were doing this time LAST weekend! He thought I should do a 'How-To' video and post it - haha. I'm not sure I would claim enough competence to do any such thing! Let's just say I'm happy with how things turned out, but now that I've done it, I've learned a LOT about how I might do things differently next time. SO, if you're contemplating a concrete staining project in your future, let me know. I'll share all my mistakes with you so that you don't have to repeat them. :D


We wanted to do an acid etch concrete stain on the back porch. After a bit of investigating, we decided on this stuff from Lowes: Quikrete Etching Stain and Etching Stain High Gloss Sealer. It only comes in 3 colors - tan, olive, and coffee - and we chose the tan because it was the lightest of the 3 colors. And even at that, it still came out pretty dark. Of course, a lot about the final color depends on the concrete that you are working with. I started out this whole thing by pressure washing the back porch - but even after that, I had a lot of 'red clay' stains that just wouldn't come out... so I think that my have something to do with the 'reddish' color that we ended up with. But the Quikrete says that it will give you an 'oldworld marbled look' to your concrete -- and it definitely does that.

Anyways, here is where we stared things last Saturday morning. We wanted to cut a pattern into the concrete to make it look tiled, so Jack cut 3 ft. diamonds into the concrete with his circular saw - pretty cool. LOTS of dust and noise!!

Next was vacuuming up all the concrete dust and taping off all the exposed surfaces that we didn't want to get stain on. I don't know what it is about having to do this step in things, but it always seems so tedious. I wanted to skip it (lazy!) -- but found out that would have been a very bad idea! Even with all the covering, we got stain on the siding in a couple of places...

After the taping, you have to clean the concrete with this stuff called TSP. I have no idea what that stands for. :-) But it cleans and etches the concrete and prepares it for the stain. All I know is that I had to use a scrub brush and scrub down the whole back porch... and that was tiring and hard on the back!

You have to let the concrete dry for 4 hours after the TSP, so it was almost dark when we finally got to putting the stain on the concrete. And it WAS dark by the time we finished and took a picture! By the way, the staining was really a two-person process. You have to lightly wet down the contrete just before you put the stain on... so I was running just in front of Jack with a hose spraying down the concrete while he went behind me spraying on the stain... and by the way, I wore long pants and a long sleeve shirt and rubber gloves, etc... and STILL got stain on my elbow and shin... ???? That takes a little while to wear off. ;-)


This is how it looked the next morning after the stain had dried and begun to set.


So that was Sunday morning -- later in the day, came the least fun part of all of this. You have to wash the 'etching residue' off the concrete. Now, if I had done this right the first time, it may not have taken 3 'washings' to do this -- but it definitely would have at least taken 2. You have to mix a bucket of baking soda and water and pour it on small sections of the concrete, scrub it with a brush to get the residue off, and then quickly suck it up with a wet/dry vacuum before the dirty water dries back on the concrete. (The first time I did this, I missed the part about getting the water up quickly - so I scrubbed the whole porch and THEN went back over it with the vacuum... but too much of the water, and residue, had already dried back onto the concrete... sigh) Anyways, I did that whole process once on Sunday night and then twice on Monday morning... and at that point decided that it was done, regardless of whether there was any residue left or not!! ha

Well, then you have to wait 24 hours before you can apply the Etching Stain Topcoat... so I'm into Tuesday morning by now and I had this small little window of time at lunch that day to get that done before about 20 girls showed up for the 'Princess Party' at my house that afternoon. The plan all along had been to finish this project over the weekend -- but as with most great plans, it took little longer that that! ;-) Anyways, the topcoating wasn't too bad -- you put that on with a brush and roller - and it looks really pretty when you're done. I enjoyed that part. :-) It's an epoxy sealer, so it makes the concrete look a little shiny and waterproofs it. And this is the finished product:

It was a couple of days later before I had time to move all the funiture back in and get a new rug and plant... but I think it all came out looking pretty nice. And it's SO peaceful and pleasant to sit out here now...

...and yes, Mandy is pretty excited because she thinks we did all of this for her. :-)

So, that's the saga of my porch makeover. :-) A good bit of work, but as I sit here this morning, it was well worth the effort. Now I just need to mow my back yard!! haha