Pati-oh no!

I've been a little busy this past weekend and Mr. Cush kindly agreed to handle today's post for me. He's the best. Hope y'all enjoy! ~Ashley

At some point a month or so ago, Mrs. Cush decided we needed to spruce up the back patio.  We previously had bare concrete, a grill, two lattice metal chairs and a small table.  We never spent any time out there because 1) it’s friggin’ too hot to lounge outside in the Texas summer heat, 2) the chairs were not lounge-worthy, 3) it was just not attractive.

Patio before.

We headed to Tar-jhey (French for Target) and bought some reclining patio chairs, a table big enough for a citronella candle and a few beers, some colorful pillows, several hanging flower baskets, some tasteful string party lights and a ceramic blue turtle (because why not?). This made a dramatic difference, but it still needed something else. 

Our patio was plain - bare concrete - and this provided the largest opportunity to change its look.  Mrs. Cush wanted to get an outdoor rug, but we could not find one that matched the dimensions of our patio.  The rugs that we looked at were either several feet too small or too big.  She wanted it to fill the entire patio, but did not want to cut the rug to fit even though I would have had to do the cutting (the thought of her getting her hands dirty measuring and cutting a rug amuses me).  We discussed possibly staining the concrete, so I did some research.  We were going for a dark-gray marbled look.  I bought the appropriate supplies and began the project.  I figured that since the stain was going to be dry enough to apply a glossy sealer after a few hours, I could finish the project in one day. 

We (yes, we) started the project by using blue painter’s tape to cover the edges and surfaces that we did not want to be stained.  After a grueling four minutes of this, Mrs. Cush had had enough of that grunt-work and decided to supervise from inside… on the couch…with the TV on…while socializing on her phone…with some of our Pink Pool Concoction.  I finished the other 97% of the taping, then cleaned the concrete with an acid etch, put down two thin layers of stain, and it looked pretty good.

This is before I applied the sealer. I could have stopped here, but the chairs would have chipped the outdoor stain if a sealer was not used.

I applied a thin layer of glossy sealer after the stain dried.  The sealer protects the stain and also adds a glossy ‘wet’ look.  It looked great at first, but then it began to bubble up like a fire-baked pizza crust.  I had followed the instructions to the ‘T’, so I was pretty pissed off.  I sought the advice of my best friend Google and found that a product called Xylene can melt the bubbling sealer, allowing me to use a paint roller and spread it again.  Another option was to just let the sealer fully dry, then allow it to ‘breathe’ by lightly sanding it and apply another thin layer of sealer.  I went with option #2 and it made the issue worse.  Along with the bubbling sealer, the whole patio developed a milky haze.  This was also very time and labor intensive. 

"Milky haze" was probably an understatement.

At this point, I was kicking myself for not vetoing the ‘no cutting the rug’ decree.  We could have been enjoying the patio by now if we had just plopped down a rug, but I digress.  I had no choice but to remove the sealer by melting it with some Xylene, a dangerous and possibly carcinogenic paint thinner (For some reason, the can stated that California considered it to be carcinogenic.  Why is there no input from the other 49 states on that?)  After several applications of Xylene, the bubbles were gone and the patio looked pretty glossy.  I found that the root cause of this nonsense was a combination of the outdoor humidity and the fact that our concrete had a rough finish (not smooth).  The Xylene allowed the sealer to be thinned and spread.  It also increased the dry time, which is good because it allowed any trapped water vapor to escape (the bubbling occurred because the sealer caused the moisture trapped in the concrete to not be able to evaporate).

Improvement.

The sealer is now dry and the patio is more or less a glossy onyx color now.  This should serve as a good base for adding colorful flowers and other decorations.  From start to finish, all of this took several weekends; hardly a one-day project.  The materials for this ended up being about 40% of the cost of a rug, but it was a lot more work.  All of this trouble could have been avoided if Mrs. Cush would have allowed an 8 inch cut in a rug. (I do like the way this eventually turned out, though).

Patio after.