The day has finally arrived! I am soooo excited as we get ready for this huge day for the kitchen project! For this day we asked for a few more friends to help! We ended up with 5 guys for the concrete. And I think that was the perfect amount. And Tiffani and I were there for whatever we could help with! We rented a mixer from Home Depot and got to work!
DIY Concrete Countertops
We already had our formula for the color figured out. So the guys just had to follow it for each batch. I will say we had a few issues with consistency in the batches of cement. All of the blogs and youtube videos will say you want the concrete to be pretty think and that is true. But there seems to be a happy medium where it also needs to not be to dry! All in all most of the batches came out pretty well and with my Father in law and Jonathan at the finishing trowels it came out beautiful!
And a very important step was vibrating the edges.. to make sure to get as many air bubbles out as we could. ( After the forms came off you can really tell where we took time to make sure we vibrated really well and where we may have rushed a little bit)
It took us about 6 hours or so I would say to get it all in and smoothed out. And then the waiting game for it to set a bit to be able to run the trowel through it again…
this is a cool panoramic pic our friend Justin took!
At the end of the day we sprayed the surface with an even layer of water and then tented it with plastic. All of the tips and tricks say to allow for the counters to dry as slowly as possible, so we sprayed it a few more times in the next couple days.
The concrete was done on Saturday morning. By late Monday night we were ready to pull of the forms!! I just loved them right away!!! I mean look at how they turned out??!!!
William stayed up late so he could help pull of the forms! 🙂
Head over to our Youtube channel here to see a video of William helping us pull off the forms https://youtu.be/lguafGGtfjE
look at these DIY Concrete countertops!!!! And they aren’t even finished yet…..
And then we sanded them! Turns out this was quite a process we really didn’t calculate.. it took the guys a whole night of tiring work. We ended up buying a wet/dry sander for the job and some diamond pads!
Because sanding with the orbital sander was going to take forever and go through a ton of pads… sooooo this machine.. was super duper messy. The poor guys were soaked through, the kitchen was draped all over ceiling to floor with thick plastic, and we still had soaked carpet on one side and concrete splatter in some areas!!
But the results were sooo worth the work! I cannot believe we got all these beautiful specks and sparkles out of the concrete!!
We sealed it with a food grade sealer from concretecountertopsolutions called z-siAcryl-14. And we will be adding their polish called Z-Counter shine this week. For extra polish and protection from stains!
I just can’t get over how lovely these are!! And the little bits of imperfections are exactly what we bargained for by doing concrete and I think they add character to the whole thing!
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