Our new driveway...phase II

Today our driveway was aged enough for us to begin the staining of the block borders. We were using chemical stains, which require the concrete to be at least 28 days old, but we cheated by a few days. We had time between jobs, so it was today, or wait another month at least. The concrete was uncolored, but stamped with a walnut release, so that influenced the outcome a bit. We used 5 different colors of stain, 4 brown shades and a green tone.

While Bill was putting the mini walls in the flower bed, I stained the individual stones on the borders. This sounds very easy, but it is easy to mess up. You want the effect to be random, so you have to do one color at a time, and sort of bop around here and there. You have to be careful not to do too many stones, with one color and also to not create a pattern with the stain. Here are some pictures of before and after the stain.

After you have stained all the individual stones, the other "background" stones have to be stained too. Depending on the effect desired, there are several ways to do this. The easiest way is to just go with the flow, and not be too uptight about the individual stones getting the background color on them. This is the way we did it. Here is a picture of the background stain.

Here is another picture but this is after the stain has been washed off. This simulates what it will look like after it has been sealed. It was dark when I took these pictures, so the flash has made it a little hotter than it will be in real life, but you can get an idea.

I love chemical stains. It is a great process that can give some very interesting colors and effects on concrete.

This has nothing to do with our driveway, but I was reading some comments on another blog in reference to stamped concrete. The ignorant person who left the comment that stamped concrete was ugly, because it *looked* like stamped concrete has obviously never seen good stampwork. We are doing an add on project for a customer. We did his old patio and porches about twelve years ago. He is was so pleased with it that he called us back to match the old parts. He too great pride in telling us the story of his many guests that actually argued with him, telling him that there was no way our work was concrete, and that it was the best slate job they had ever seen. He was so smug that he didn't even bother to inform them of their error. The Patterned Concrete name stamp should have given it away....