Love/Hate Relationship

I love this business because I love serving people directly by creating great surfaces. I love my team. I love the architects, designers and builders we get to work with. I love floors like this:

This floor used a wash of chemical staining with sodium dichromate and hydrochloric acid followed by a Black Penetrating Stain diluted 5:1 with acetone. The cream of the concrete was left intact.

I sort of hate how we are all conditioned as consumers to want what we want regardless of the rest of the world. I sort of hate not being able to recreate the same thing every time like a factory. I sort of hate folks “Appreciating imperfection, but not ____________________” We have followed this recipe dozens, maybe 100s of times by now:

Everything else truly is future-garbage by comparison. What I love about this recipe is how clearly this is concrete, yet how elevated it looks. Staining does that, and light, subtle washes do that without looking like we are working too hard to mimic other surfaces.

I love making floors that may outlast my grandchildren. I hate when people spend too much on overlays trying to make perfect concrete flooring and freak out after 2 years because all cement-based materials take on a patina. “It chipped and turned ____________ !“(insert least favorite color here: white, black, brown are optios). I wish things could be perfect, and I work as hard as I can every day with that goal. But in the words of Bill Gilliland (Marble Falls Homebuilder) “If it was perfect, it wouldn’t be cool.”