Painted Concrete DIY

May 22, 2018

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As you may know, we installed a stock tank pool the other weekend. The Houston weather has been nice lately, and we have taken several dips. But today I’m not here to talk about stock tank installation, I’m here to talk about what to do with the space around the stock tank. The area that we placed our stock tank in our yard is a little unique. We measured it out, and decided to place ours in a small area between our sun room and the concrete driveway pad thing that was a decaying herb garden. See photo below.

old herb garden

I know what some of you may be thinking, “What’s wrong with the herb garden? Don’t you want to keep it?” The answer is no. The dog and cat had pretty much dug up all the living plants, and the wooden boxes were full of ants and rotted. We carefully transplanted the scraggly surviving mint, oregano and cilantro and put them in pots along the shed (photos of that to come later). Then I got to daydreaming and sketching out my idea:

stock tank pool plan

The Plan: I decided I wanted to add some curves to the area to compliment the round pool. I knew I wanted to use garden edging to create a nice wavy shape to connect the concrete driveway pad to our wood porch area. Right now our yard feels like there’s so many sections/areas and they don’t really flow into one another. Adding the curved area to connect the concrete to the porch would help it all flow better. Originally I wanted to fill in the area around the pool with black and white rocks, but after pricing it out, we decided to go with good old black and red mulch:

mulch

Why are rocks so expensive?!?! Maybe next year we will replace the black mulch with rocks. The grand plan is to fill in the red mulch area that borders the sun room area with nice green, tropical plants.

The work: We roughly drew out where everything would go in the dirt and placed the garden edging wave:

diy stock tank pool

Then we filled ‘er in. Our first layer was leveled sand under the pool. Our next was weed-blocker paper. Then we placed the pool, and added the mulch and walkway steps on top:

After living with the above situation for a few days, I just couldn’t help but feel like something was “off” with the design. And then it dawned on me. THE CURVES! I didn’t like that the wavy mulched area just abruptly ended at the concrete driveway. My flow had been ruined, and the pool area felt so confined! I got to daydreaming again, and I came up with a plan to make the lines softer – PAINT THE CONCRETE. Yes, you read that right. Paint on the concrete. Most people said I was crazy when I pitched them the paint idea. David said, “It’s better than me ripping up the concrete.”  And that was all the approval I needed folks 🙂

So I grabbed the painter’s tape and got to laying out a plan:

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Doesn’t that already look so much better? After staring at that taped area for a minute or two, I decided that we needed to continue the concrete steps into the soon-to-be-faux-mulch area. I didn’t want the steps to just end and lead to nowhere.

So I traced the steps onto paper and cut out a rough stencil:

Then I traced the rectangular pattern onto the concrete pad. It’s a little hard to see, but here you go:

DIY paint concrete steps

Next, I got to painting. I used on quart of this concrete paint from Home Depot and a regular crappy paint brush. I noticed it went faster, and was easier to fill-in if I actually poured a big glob of paint onto the concrete and then use the push to push it around.

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Altogether, this project took about 2 hours to complete. It was pretty easy to do, and I love the end result. It’s been about a month, and the paint has held up and it blends nicely with the mulch.

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What do ya’ll think? Did my optical illusion work?

 

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