he told me so

Ok, boys and girls. The (expensive) lesson we have learned today is that proper preparation is GOOD. No, it is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. And lazy and impatient are BAD.

While embarking on our last floor-staining adventure, my O.H. sagely opined that it might be wise to put a skim coat of concrete down on our once-damaged, many-times repaired slab prior to staining it. I replied with something to the effect of "pish posh, don't be silly. All that prep we're going to do to it - acid etching, neutralizing, cleaning, all with a big floor buffer - will even it out." (Don't worry, I didn't really say "pish posh". That would be difficult to translate. And weird.)

So we prepped the slab as we did for our ill-fated bedroom/office; probably spent about $100 in chemicals, $65 in buffer rental. Having learned that despite good prep, acrylic stains do not last, we also purchased about $220 worth of acid stain from Lowe's. (Running total so far for the mathematically challenged: $385.00.) We applied the stain yesterday, and since this one was really an acid, we had to protect the baseboards and walls from overspray, so we spent about an hour taping off the baseboards and walls with plastic.

We very gingerly sprayed the acid, using a pump-up garden sprayer with a heavier spray pattern. I once, just once, switched it to a fine spray pattern and inadvertently inhaled some through my mouth (spare me the mouth-breather jokes; I was actually talking to O.H., hence the open pie-hole). I hadn't used a respirator since I thought the heavy spray pattern would work. That was dumb. I immediately got a sore throat (yay! Acid in the esophagus!), followed by a restless night of mild coughing. Mild, because it was just an irritation, but restless because it started. every. time. I. fell. asleep. Today it's grown into a full-fledged very irritated sore throat/pre-cold/stuffy head/crappy feeling. So I'm not sure if stripping my throat with acid started all that, or if it's just the stress I've been under and I had it coming anyway. But to look on the bright side, I'm sure it's a very fashionable splotchy copper-color inside there now, as opposed to that boring fleshy pink the rest of you conformists still have.

Which brings me back to the floor, which was my original target for all that acid. On the parts that were not patched with some obviously non-chemically reactive crap, it turned out beautifully. As for those crappy parts, they now stick out like a sore thumb. When it was all grey, it really didn't look that bad. I swear. But the stain immediately highlighted every single flaw on our floor.

Witness Exhibit A: Pre-cleaning, dirty slab: note space-cats observing strange humanoid behavior from back porch and obviously talking about me since I couldn't hear through the glass door. Their conversation was probably as follows:

Boo-Boo: she's not really gonna stain it without a skim coat, is she?

Romeow: I do believe she is.

Boo-Boo: Everybody knows the acid won't react with all those non-concrete white splotches.

Romeow: Yeah, we're just cats and even we know it. Too bad we don't have opposable thumbs. We could open this door and actually tell her.

Boo-Boo: Oh well, that's what she gets for putting us out here. Her loss.

I'm pretty sure their conversation went something like that.

Exhibit B: post-clean, post-etched slab:

Looks good, right? That's what I thought too! Begin application of stain for exhibit C, also known as the "descent into stupidity" (mine, not his):

And after 24 hours of curing, and two neutralizing scrubs with baking soda (who knew? Baking soda!), there were parts of it that ended up absolutely beautiful, Exhibit D:

And unfortunatley, those that ended up not-so-beautiful, Exhibit E. The "E" is for "Error".

And finally, Exhibit "F", which stands for "Failure to properly prepare".

As you can see, although a mottled look is desirable, the white patches and grey orbs are not. Since we had a good result with the acrylic stain in the bedroom covering some white patches, the hope was the same thing would happen in the living room. Apparently, the living room's white patches like to assert themselves more than those in the bedroom, and they just kept shining through. I even tried to "paint" them with the acrylic stain, but they overpowered the wimpy pigment. OUT, OUT, DAMN [white] SPOT(s)! (Sorry, somebody had to say it.)

SO. That brings me to my ultimate mea culpa, which was telling O.H. that he was right, and I was wrong. He was very gracious about it, kept the eye rolling to a polite minimum. Ever see Rita Rudner's act about "I told you so"? The one where she says she won't say it but she'll sing it? And then hums, in the same tone of voice that you'd say it in, "Hmmm HMMM hmmm hmmmm". Yeah, lots of that going on here.

We ended up locating a store here in Jax that is all about the modern concrete - counters, stain, misc. fabrication, etc. Very cool. Called DC Surfaces. (Not sure what the DC means - decorative concrete, maybe?) Managed to buy the kits we need to do an overlay (the damn skim coat I should've done before the LAST stain application), bond it to the existing slab, stain it AGAIN, and seal it. The good news is, the overlay is guaranteed to react with the stain due to extra limestone and stuff, whereas normal concrete is not. Plus, normal concrete needs to cure for a month before staining, which would kind of throw my timeline off. So THIS should give us the result we want. And all of that stuff totalled less than $500, which is a relative bargain compared to the QuickCrete stuff we bought at Lowe's, where the stain alone was $72 per gallon. And we used 3 gallons. Ouch.

Skim coat goes on tomorrow. Wish me (and my kneepads) luck.

Still no news on Mr. Roscoe. Hope to hear from vet tomorrow.