Acid Staining in Alaska- One Man's Saga

I was recently hired to create a floor in a home in Fairbanks, Alaska. With every project comes a story about how you were contacted, negotiating the price, picking colors, and the actual installation. I am going to write about this trip in a couple of articles and include a little history about our most northern state.

Jim and Gayle Binkley, a couple building an 8,000 square foot timber frame home outside of Fairbanks, contacted me. Jim is a riverboat captain of the family owned company Alaska Riverways, Inc. Captain Jim had been doing his homework on what he wanted for his walkout basement floor. Jim loved the look of acid stained floors that he had found in Concrete Décor magazine. With just a phone call, Jim had me interested, so he sent me photos of the job and a floor plan.

Before we could talk price we had to have an understanding of what he was looking for in colors and patterns. I made a couple photocopies of the floor plan and studied the pictures. He had three areas that needed a different look: the bar, swim spa/ recreation area, and a motor sports showroom. Each area was connected so the floor had to flow from one room to the next. The walls and trim were all in mahogany and redwood and the bar ceiling was in copper.

Utilizing the shape of the rooms I started a layout. When cutting a pattern in the floor it is hard to get close to the walls so I started with a border. Half of the bar is an octagon so I created a starburst pattern. The open area of the swim spa has numerous angles so I decided to go with a 2-foot tile pattern. The showroom was also in an octagon but I kept it simple with just perimeter bands. I then picked a few colored pencils and shaded the areas to help see the patterns. This was enough to get the ball rolling with Jim.

He then expanded on the layout with the idea of putting a ships wheel in the bar floor and adding a set of checkered flags to the center of the showroom. He also added a mariner's compass and a fowled anchor. We now had a layout but still had to pick colors. I sent him color charts from some of the stain manufactures to choose from. He found QC's colors to be the best fit for the project, since they were darker than the other manufacturers.

This was not enough, he still had a couple colors that he wanted but they are not available in acid stains. It was hard to pick the colors from a color chart so I sent him concrete color chips of QC's Patena Stains and Cem-Tint. Cem-Tint is a penetrating stain that comes in numerous colors. That was the ticket- Jim found the samples easy to work with and they also helped his interior designer coordinate from the colors. The colors were picked using some Patena Stains and some in Cem-Tint. The checker flag needed to be white of course. I decided to use white Concrete Resurfacer, which is the thickness of a credit card. I also decided to use the Concrete Resurfacer on the ships wheel. Jim wanted a durable gloss finish on the floor so I decided to use a solvent based urethane for a coating. Since there is a swim spa in the room I also decided to use a non-skid additive in the urethane.

This is the beginning of the Alaska project, with the unknowns of how the floor would take the stain and how the colors would truly come out. I flew to Fairbanks on October 1^st. Tune into my next article for what happens when I arrive.