Paint a Concrete Floor With Faux Marble Tiles

With practice you can create the look of real marble using just a few colors. Be sure to practice on wood or canvas before doing this on your floors!

Once it's been cleaned well, concrete does a great job of absorbing diluted paints and stains. We cleaned our concrete with muriatic acid and made a post about the safety tips here.

For this green marble (with a hint of blue) we used these products: 

• Exterior Green Primer, Tropical Foliage, by Kilz (Walmart)

• Flat Black Primer, by Behr (HomeDepot)

• Concrete Stain, Emerald Pool, by Behr (HomeDepot)

• Chalk Paint in Plaster, by Waverly (Walmart)

We chose these products for their superior bonding qualities. Since you'll be diluting the paint, you won't need very much. We used about 1 quart of emerald pool, and 1 quart of tropical green for about 300 square feet. We used about 2 ounces each of the black and white.

Fancy paint brushes will not do for this project! We recommend tough nylon chip brushes which we've listed in the materials section. Though they may lose bristles now and then, they stand up to hours and days of scrubbing concrete. Also, by putting a small amount of our colors into plastic shoe boxes, the paint stayed liquid for 6 weeks when sealed with the lid between painting sessions.

We divided the floor into 5 sections. Each section took about 5 hours to marbleize. We've left some of the edges unpainted for faux brick trim which we'll show you in a future post. Sitting on a stool took pressure off of our legs allowing us to work long hours.

To create the look of grout lines, we left them unpainted and let the concrete show through. We worked out the block design one section at a time, using sidewalk chalk and a straight edge. It's a random design as if it were made from reclaimed marble tile by a very skilled mason. No measuring was done at all. If the design is too regular or perfect, it will not look as real.

It's fun to draw on concrete with chalk and if you want to change the design, erase it with a baby wipe and redraw it. Make sure to stand back and look at your design from all angles before committing to it and adding paint.

After 30 or more hours of marbleizing, we came up with this system of washing with green water, then feathering lines with green, black, and white paint. Stay away from the grout lines if your concrete is super absorbent. If you goof, remember, you can always touch up your grout later with gray chalk paint (that's what we're going to do!)

Here's our secret for a fabulous finish. After the marble pattern dries for a few hours, go over it with concrete stain. Behr makes these in wonderful colors and they are not very expensive. We used "Emerald Pool" sometimes adding a hint of chalk white to create a blue haze. Layering is the secret to an amazing look … but don't make a thick paint job on your concrete! Work with watery colors that will soak into the concrete and use lots of sealer on top!

Here's what the concrete porch looked like before painting.

Here's what it looks like with the marbleizing. Soon we'll show you how we're doing the faux brick using similar techniques! You can see more photos of this project at our website here. -- Stephie