Concrete Walkway Installation Technique

The entryway on the floor itself was a great sort of new technique I came up with for this house, and I was trying to find a texture that would work not only for slippage, so when things got wet, you wouldn't have a slick concrete surface that would be unsafe, but at the same time, come up with a texture that wasn't the usual salt finish or sand or washed finish. So I had the idea of using the tool used to make lines in sidewalks and adapt in a situation to create long lines. But when I did it and I experimented with it, it was a little rough and it looked a little rough. So I thought about it some more and played around with the idea, and finally it occurred to me to use the tool and then let it set up and then polish and grind it. I needed to figure out beyond just the texture and the graphic idea of the lines, what could give it a little color? So I thought, well, maybe if I broadcast some blue glass in here, would that be able to stay in there with the tool?

And so we experimented a little bit, broadcast some blue glass on a small slab, ran the tool over it and, lo and behold, it looked like it worked, at least it didn't mess up the tooling, and it pushed down all the glass. And then I said, "Well, what am I gonna do? I've got all the glass underneath the concrete." So, grind the surface. Then the idea was, okay, now you have these little ridges and you're going to grind the tops off, kind of like grind the peaks off of all the texture. And by God, it worked and here's the result.

From countertops to floors, fireplaces, walls, you can see that anything is possible with concrete. You can start small and dream big.