Pressure wash fresh concrete for a practical and attractive finish

[james]

Pressure washing fresh concrete to reveal aggregates

I worked with concrete a lot over the past few years, from polishing concrete floors, shuttering, concrete worktops, pathways, foundations or just plain old slabs, I’ve done the lot.

Basic concrete is an easy DIY job, it’s labour intensive but cheap in materials so well suited for those who wish to save some cash. The most popular post of all time on Survive France is in fact nothing to do with France at all, it’s all about concrete!

I began work on a pathway around the house a couple of days ago, rather than leave it as a standard roughish industrial finish I simply pressure washed the surface off after a few hours exposing the aggregates which are just beneath the surface. This has created a non slip and uniform surface that is quite attractive.

Depending on your mix and ambient temperature and also how much of the stone you wish to expose I would recommend waiting somewhere between 12 and 24 hours to do this. Do a test patch first.

This is what the fresh pour looks like, not the tell tale ridges from the screed baton, these will be removed with the pressure washing.

Before and after comparison

More hardcore reading below;

How to - Polish a concrete floor

Being a fan of the semi industrial look, I've loved polished concrete since I first picked up Fu Tung Cheng's book on the subject, 'Concrete Countertops'. Recently I poured some new concrete floors with the intention of polishing them; here's a bit of information on how I did it. The post is intentionally brief. I'm quite passionate about the subject so I encourage you to ask any questions you might have and I'll do my best to impart some of my knowledge of the subject. If you already have concrete floors then you're off to a good start. In this case I didn't. There was originally an earth floor in this part of the house, so I needed to pour new concrete. The benefit of this was that I was able to make the floor perfectly flat to within a tolerance of just a few millimetres; this meant that there was less work to do to polish the floor. [image] Using what are called expansion joints or 'joints de dilatation' - I was able to level the floor off with a screed batten very easily…

Polished Concrete worktops and floors

Just finished a test section of concrete, I will be making the kitchen worktops from concrete at some point, so I want to get a feel for what aggregated and additions look good. [image]