Polished Concrete: Detailed Review

Polished concrete is an undeniably versatile material. It offers you an opportunity to customise its appearance in whichever way you deem fit. You can use quartz, aggregates, and colours to create a sense of sophistication in both homes and commercial buildings. Further, its reflective surface produces an evocative quality under light, making it suitable for a variety of programs.

Typically, you can give your floor, countertop, wall or even the ceiling a glossy nature by converting the normal concrete form to polished concrete. However, you have to expose your concrete to a series of steps to give an outcome of a dust-proof and glossy surface. Such a surface comes with the advantage of being easy to clean and maintain and a custom brightness that results in an appealing look.

Polished concrete types

There are different kinds of polished concrete on the Gold Coast, which arise due to the use of various procedures or materials. For instance, the diamond grit you use to polish your floor can give a range of sheen; matte and glossy finish are two examples. Also, the amount of aggregate exposure gives different looks. You can get a cream finish that lacks exposure or go for a full aggregate look.

Let’s look at common types

  • Cream Polish: this type of polish comes with the most consistent and smoothest sheen when polishing the floor. This kind of polished floor usually accepts dyes and stains readily, and in a consistent way.
  • Aggregate Polish: Perhaps this is most costly of all the types of concrete floors but the most impressive in terms of looks.
  • Salt and Pepper Polish: this kind of look is the most achievable, and accepts stains and colour reasonably well. Still, it holds a crisp shine when well done. However, it ends up exposing racks and small holes, which are visible on the floor that is finished.

Bonded abrasive polished concrete

To get this kind of concrete floor, you’ll have to mix a number of things such as the abrasive grains, bonding material, and fillers. Bonding materials that are effective include shellac, rubber, resin, epoxy and magnesite, and they are applied to the surface until you get a class of glossy aggregate exposure.

Burnished concrete can also help you to achieve a gloss look. In this case, the concrete surface will undergo a thorough friction rubbing using an abrasive pad. However, you can take an optional route of using topical polished concrete or a hybrid polished concrete. These types use a liquid coating on the concrete floor.

Polishing concrete

There are two methods of polishing concrete, i.e., wet and dry methods.

Dry concrete polishing

This method uses a commercial polishing machine, where each stage requires a different polishing disk. The abrasive discs incorporate diamond grit that has coarser textures at earlier stages as compared to later stages. The final shiny look is due to finer diamond grit.

Keep in mind that the stage doesn’t need water. The dust produced is thus vacuumed. However, the majority of the dust goes into the air. But in some cases, water might be used between stages to minimise dust.

Wet concrete polish

Water is extensively used in this method. Usually, water is poured on the concrete surface so that the dust produced forms a slurry over the concrete. The disks used here have the same size of grit, making the outcome of having a lustre rather than a glassy shine.

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