Staining & Texturizing Concrete Walls

by Adele Kurtz

2 Materials

$200

10 Hours

Medium

The space that became my studio was a bleak dark mess we called the dungeon.

The concrete retaining walls just outside were painted black and went up way over your head: overkill to say the least. One could see they did not need to be nearly so high to do their job.

I had a concrete cutter cut those walls when I wanted glass block windows put into the basement. (Cost for concrete cutting and glass block installation $600)

My hubby & I then used jacks and our truck with chains to move the cut out portion as as nice ledge. (We would have been charged $300 to discard)

Lots more light, but still ugly.

So I decided to texturize, stain and seal them.

Here my photo record of the final stages as I progressed.

Left side is cut-out opening. (It used to go full height)

New Glass Block Window put into black painted concrete.

I started smearing tinted concrete over old black concrete using a trowel and my gloved hands. The tinted concrete made a good base for more stain and adhered just fine to the old black wall.

Concrete Stain, fortifier, stain and sealer

Some of the products used: Concrete. Concrete Stain. Concrete Fortifier. Deck Stain. Concrete Sealer.

I really did not like the looks of the concrete stain by itself. Even when I went back with other Behr concrete products overtop.

After a year is took on a pink tone that I really hated.

Then I discovered a solution by accident that made me happy again.

I was painting the wood of my home with transparent oil-based cedar. When it dripped onto my concrete walls it added a beautiful richer dimension that I really liked much better than stains Behr and Sherwin Williams sold specifically for concrete.

Here's a sample of how it looked when I rubbed the oil-based cedar stain over the base coat (done the year before) and sealed it. WOW!

Sorry I don't have a closeup of the before. But you can get the idea from the first shot that it was OK, but not wonderful.

So I kept on going... I trowelled more stained concrete into the stone wall cut out we had re-purposed into a ledge on top of stacked rocks, and filled-in some areas to create a natural spill.