Hello lovelies! We hope you are having a wonderful Friday! Today, we thought we’d cover a little more on our backyard bliss series, and how to paint concrete specifically that diamondtastic (yes, I did just write that) pattern on our back porch underneath our pergola.
How to paint concrete
Once upon a time, when we moved into our home, the back porch area looked like this:
Cue the cheesy sound effects with a gigantic Womp womp. It was certainly nice, but a little lacking in the style and fun department. So we did a few things over the process of a few years to change it over.
Our process
First, we had concrete laid to extend our porch. While we are DIY’ers at heart, some things are best left to the professionals, and a big concrete slab like this was best left to them. (For the record, this was circa 2007, before we decided to take the bull by the horns, and even if we could, we would probably still leave this to a group of pros who can knock it out in a swift and efficient manner for us.)
When we first laid that concrete, it was a plain slab. So we cut into it, to give it a little personality. We had a quote at the time for stamped concrete, and this was just much more cost efficient. We enjoyed our porch and it was fabulous.
After that, we decided our home could use a little more space. It was actually Jamin’s idea – I still give him kudos for it. So we had a room added on to our home, by having a wall built. You can see the after here, and read more about the value that brought to our home, here.You’d be amazed at the difference one extra room can make.
Today, we thought we’d touch on a few of those things that finally came together to complete the look of our pergola. This was such a long process that happened gradually over time, so we don’t have photographs for everything all in one place.As you can see, it sat outside, scored and stained for a very long time, before we decided to turn it into this:
On scoring the concrete:
You can actually achieve the look of our porch just by painting your concrete. But we love the extra touch it brought to our outdoor space, with that extra detail. So we measured out exactly how our porch would be by establishing a border, and then measuring diagonal lines from there.
We used a chalkline to measure it all out, pop to mark the line, and cut. I had this post planned out with a detailed diagram, and then I realized (because the mom brain is mush and I’m one big dorkfest overachiever) that all of this will depend on the pattern you wish to use. Making me and my nerdy diagrams completely irrelevant. ;} Ours was a bit of a challenge because our porch is not a perfect square. So when we measured everything for our own porch, we made sure that all the large diamonds were even, and that the lines would be two feet apart.
We used a circular saw or skill saw, with a diamond tipped concrete blade. We set our depth (this is all preference) at about 1/8 of an inch. This process for our porch only took one blade, and it was a project that lasted the best part of an afternoon. That was it. A little personality for your concrete porch.
It sat for a few years (stained) before we were able to paint it.
Before the paint:
We simply started by pressure washing our now gunky, under-the-pecan tree porch area. We were shocked by how much had accumulated over time. (Now that the concrete is painted, we will probably give it a yearly scrub-up. We won’t be pressure washing again unless we wish to remove the paint.)
Using rollers for our project, we used the lighter grey color (Benjamin Moore’s Willow Creek) first and started next to our home’s wall, working our way out. Whatever light areas showed in the “grout lines” we overlapped, letting it dry before we added the dark grey (Benjamin Moore’s Bear Creek).
Please note:
only concrete paint will work with this. Latex will peel, so when having your paint mixed, be sure to let your handy dandy paint guy know what this is for. Concrete paint is thinner, allowing it to seep into the pours. This will give you a better finish for your outdoor floors.
Tada! We were finished… and it absolutely transformed our back porch… pergola or no. This only took a couple of hours to complete and really was worth the time and effort for an affordable, simple transformation.
We really can’t believe it took us that long to change it! And even longer to write abouthow to paint concrete.
As always, if you guys try this let us know! We’d love to see!
Have an inspired day everyone!
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