Patio Makeover
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Thursday, August 25, 2005 at 01:23 PM [GMT-6]

We just finished another step in our ongoing project to jack up our old house and run a new one in under it. This one involved resurfacing our back patio.

For years, the patio had been decorated with paint over bare concrete, in a faux tile pattern. But the paint didn't hold up well to periodic soakings from the sprinkler system, overflowing flower pots or rain that blew in during storms. It was bubbling and cracking in many places, and the concrete itself had a few cracks.

Enter a product called "PermaCrete," a polymer-cement mixture that the manufacturer claims to be fire-proof (protection against barbecues gone bad), water-proof and, well, bullet-proof (the possibility of scamper-by shootings by our backyard squirrels have been a nagging concern ever since we found that dead mockingbird on our back porch).

PermaCrete is applied to the bare concrete and forms an impenetrable layer. It can be colored in any hue, and when applied in multiple layers it can replicate the look of tile, flagstone or just about any other floor covering you can imagine.

I won't go into much detail about how our particular project unfolded. Suffice it to say that it took a month and two days to complete the 298 square foot application, and at one point there were three people painstakingly hand-painting individual tile patterns due to a learning curve error by the contractor. Apparently, we are doomed to a lifetime of "redesign projects from heck" (it would have been worse, but we weren't paying by the hour).

In the end, it turned out pretty well...not as good as we'd hoped, but not as bad as we feared. It's a big improvement over what we had before. It's somewhat unfortunate that we apparently were the first intricate project for the contractor; I think that with a few more similar jobs under his belt, the results will be even better.

This is a before-and-after comparison. The base layer in the "before" shot is actually a layer of PermaCrete applied to the bare concrete (in which all the cracks were first filled and sanded). The base layer then becomes the "grout" in the final tile pattern. The layers can be applied in any desired thickness. The cost of this project worked out to be just under $5/square foot, not counting stripping the concrete.

Technorati tag: PermaCrete