Ideas are like beer. Most are like Bud Light, but sometimes you come across a good Belgian or IPA. Unfortunately my idea to pour concrete counters in my kitchen falls into the Keystone Ice category What the hell have I done?
2 weeks now after the pour and I have one hell of a mess on my hands. At this point I don’t know what is worse, the angry wife or the botched counter job. Regardless, here’s the skinny:
After the forms came off there were quite a bit of air holes exposed. So I mixed up a Buddy Rhodes slurry with some admix milk and filled not only the holes in the edge but I grouted the whole top to fill in the micro holes that opened up with an initial grind using #50 Braxton Bragg resins. Bad idea! The slurry mix was so hard after it cured that I could not grind it out, at least not all of it. So I’ve got parts of the top with exposed aggregate and solid black patches mixed all around. After several hrs with the grinder/polisher I am totally depressed! What the hell have I done?
Now I’m stuck. The tooling I have is not adequate. (At least that is what I think) At this point I’m teetering on the edge of tearing the friggin things out, trying to find someone who knows this stuff better than me and sub it out or break down and invest $2500 in a Werkmaster planetary grinder that I am convinced is what I need.
After a day of sending emails and making phone calls to local Boston concrete counter pros, no one wants to touch this thing with a 10 foot pole and I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t either. So now what? Buy the tool? No way, I’ve done that crap before, buy some specialty tool for one job just so I can feel like Tim the Tool Man, forget it.
The plan: 1 more shot- Next Saturday I will go for it one more time and see if I can bring these things back to life. The wifey agrees. And I’ll keep using my Maxwell House custom grinder!
Maxwell house grinder
Stay tuned for the comeback….
