North VA, MD, and D.C. Garage Floor Polishing and Coloring

Northern Virginia home owners often find regular concrete slabs add little beautification value to their driveways, patios or even indoor sunrooms, thereby meriting the need for immediate concrete ‘decoration intervention’, if you will.  This is where stained concrete floors come into play, transforming your drab into a more colorful slab.

This brief discussion welcomes you to the wonderful world of colorful concrete slabs, or stained concrete for short.  Northern Virginia and surrounding areas have enacted these fine garage staining ideologies into their own homesteads.

How Stained Concrete Is Applied

Most DIY methods found online actually have individuals literally staining (yes, like MinWax) concrete.  While for practical applications it does work, beginning your quest for stained concrete floors is probably better suited for professionals if your end results intend to look glossier than your darker varnishes can provide.

Thanks mainly to concrete’s porous nature, your entire garage, basement, indoor and outdoor concrete areas literally become an artist’s canvas.  Utilizing a carefully mixed solution of color, acids and primers, you can literally turn your concrete into marble, wood, a forest or anything your mind will conceive.

Several key stain application points one should consider include:

• Acid-based stains are an amalgam of water, metallic salts and hydrochloric acids
• These chemicals have an interesting reaction to concrete’s lime properties
• Stains are 100% translucent, forever
• Depending on age, thickness and amount of lime in your concrete, stained concrete floors will have different levels of reactivity
• Recently introduced concrete dyes, consisting of various solvent derivatives, have expanded consumers’ color palettes.

From surface preparation, to using dyes and tints, it’s highly imperative professionals provide the stained concrete work as opposed to DIY since mixtures must be perfect before application.

Stained Concrete Benefits

After mulling over what potential prices are involved with concrete staining and weighing those against the benefits of application, you may still need further evidence that stained concrete works wonders. Here’re more benefits of having stained concrete floors:

• Slow to cool, slow to heat – the perfect seasonal central air unit!
• Stain provides an extra layer of hardening to concrete, making it much stronger than before
• Maintenance is as simplistic as running a broom and mop
• Certain stains provide a nearly mar-resistant surface (since that was your next question)
• In terms of cost-effectiveness, carpet is traditionally replaced every decade; decorative stained concrete floors literally have limitless life spans!

Learn more about this revolutionary method, along with other decorative concrete methods, by doing research at your convenience.  Stained concrete, when applied correctly, will have the potential to make your property values skyrocket simply by investing in this stunning concrete-driven beautification method.

Where to Search

The Washington D.C. area, along with much of Maryland and Northern Virginia, has an incredible amount of home improvement contractor experience peppered around the area.  Without much research, or having Angie’s List access, make sure you place ‘vetting’ atop your contractor research to-do list.  Since acidic garage stains haven’t really ‘slammed the shelves’ per se, everyone interested in this beautification project can probably find someone around those areas to bring life to garage floors again.

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