Picture Update: Concrete Countertops!!

Productive weekend around here! Well, again, not crazy productive..but I feel accomplished J

I spent a few hours grinding on the countertops, as promised in my last post. Once you get used to the grinder, it’s a really easy process.

Grinder/sander/buffer loaded with a coarse-grit sanding disk.

As mentioned, I used a premixed grout to fill the holes in my tops. Once that layer was ground off using the 60-80 grit disks, I was able to go finer and finer. After a certain point you’re actually polishing rather than grinding. I finished after 800 and 1,500 grits and cleaned the tops of all the stone dust that had accumulated. A good wipe down with clean water and you’ll really get a chance to see what you’ve got.

Unless you've got a fancy-pants wet grinder, you'll need something to wet the surface. People have used ketchup bottles, gallon jugs with tiny holes punched in the bottom, or - like me - a sprayer and a watering can.

Top of this frame shows the area that hasn't yet been sanded. The bottom shows how the concrete looked after grinding the top layer of excess grout.

After one round of sanding on the coarsest grit.

A diamond grinding pad - by 3M. This is used to smooth out any rough spots the coarse grinding pads may have caused and help give the tops a shinier surface. 

I let the cleaned tops dry overnight and started wiping on my sealer the next day. I thought a lot about the sealer because of the location of the countertops. They’ve got to be resistant to moisture, staining, and all that..but they also need to be food safe because they’re in the kitchen. A lot of people online have said you can use a standard concrete sealer, but I still wasn’t sure.

Rather than risk it, I went back up to the Tile Shop where I picked out the stone for my floors. They had a food safe, water-based countertop sealer, but its instructions didn’t say anything specifically about concrete. Marble, granite, slate, quartz..all good. Concrete… maybe?

The sealer of choice. Penetrating sealer will give me the look I'm going for - a topical sealer or epoxy would make the concrete look kind of plastic and defeat the purpose of going to all this work!

Because I had read that there’s really not a sealer out there marketed especially for concrete countertops, I figured every manufacturer would omit the one thing I was looking for. That said, if this sealer would work with porous marble, it’s got to work with concrete. Right?

Anyway, I bought a couple quarts of it and went about my business. I ended up putting five coats on – it looks so good! J

Very dark when wet.

After a few coats - still wet.

Getting to be pretty dry. The penetrating sealer should leave it looking pretty natural while giving it more resistance to staining and things like that.

Tonight is beeswax polish night. I wanted to give the sealer a chance to fully cure as recommended in the instructions and those 24 hours expire after work this evening. I bought a (giant) chunk of pure beeswax from my friend Melissa from Wee Bee Apiary & Farm (http://www.weebeeapiary.com/) – I’ll melt that down and buff like crazy. After that, we can install them.

With help.

These babies are heavy!