We have been working on a fun project in the past few weeks. We built a pizza oven on our patio. It's neato!
The form itself is concrete. I have been reading up on the nifty things you can do to concrete to change its appearance. The pizza oven is very heavy and we didn't want to add any more weight with decorative stone so our goal was to find a topical application.
This lead me to the acid, man.
Acid stain is the coolest thing since sliced bread. It reacts to the lime in the cement. It gives this totally bitchen look, almost like marble. This is the new hip way to do cheap floors for a fraction of the price of laying down real stone.
The problem is, it's hard to find sold to the public. If we wanted to pay a pro to come and do it, no problem, but finding the actual product has been tough. We've been all over Long Beach to no avail. Then I found a website about concrete stain and it had links of places you could buy this particular brand, one listed was Resource Building Materials in Huntington Beach. We were pretty excited!
We entered RBM on a Saturday. There were no other customers inside at the time. I immediately saw a wall of bottled treatments, from clear finishes to cement colors. The entire time I stood there reading the labels (clearly looking like I needed help) nobody offered any. There were 2 salesmen behind the counter within a stones throw (pun intended).
I finally walk over to the counter and say "Hi, can I ask you a question?". Now I see why I haven't been acknowledged. The guy behind the counter is texting. He's quite involved in it. He seems a bit bothered that I've interrupted his texting. I asked him, "Do you guys sell cement acid stains?" He says, "Uh, well, um, uh" and I continue "You can put it on cement and it gives a marble type look". He says, "That's just technique" (which is absolutely not true, at all; marbling happens on its very own and is never the same twice, it's reactive and you don't have to do much but apply it).
Then he tells me they are "cracking down" on acid stains (Huh?) as he continues to text text text with his right hand. Now I know customer service is a thing of the past, but jeezus, will it kill you to stop your text message for two seconds?
He then, unenthusiastically, goes over to get a book to show me the company that makes the stuff I'm looking for. I told him, "yeah, I know that, they're the ones who sent me to you".
I'm over it. We leave. We go home and I find it online and I pay $30 to ship it. Small mom and pop shops are worried that internet sales are taking their business. This is why.
So now we sit and wait for the acid, man. It's going to be psychedelic. read more