whenever you look up some intel about the

joys of staining concrete floors there’s always

some pitch like this: ’stained concrete floors are

not only maintenance free, but can be attractive

and blah blah blah… experience the warmth and

glow of a professionally-stained concrete floor in

your new construction project today!’

well let me tell you about the ‘warmth and glow’

of prepping existing construction for staining.

first you need one of these:

4″ scraper.

then you’ll need to drink about three gallons of

water and add some smashing gloves to your mitts.

because when you’re finished scraping you’ll have

lost 5 pounds in sweat (feeling the ‘warmth and glow’)

and have added 5-6 nicely-formed blisters to boot

the blisters are warm and glow-ey as well.

so i went over this floor at least twice in its entirety

with the scraper and then brought in the big guns;

the floor sander cometh. i won’t go into the nuances

of how you and the sander will warm up to each other,

but with a few hours of concrete dust settling into

your eyes everything has a nice ‘glow’ to it.

‘is that you, grampa?…what are you doing here?’

‘come into the light…’ but with an afternoon of

sanding we had a nice clean floor . here’s another,

note the finished-out beam @ the furred-down dining

also there’s a great view of the sander with its happy

warm and glowing 500′ power cord:

clean floor II

then it was on to the staining, more on that later.