Cement Pedestal update

I'm joining The Dedicated house for
Make it Pretty Monday 

 and Kathe With an E for

Your Gonna Love It

 
Well as I showed you in my previous post the pedestals that we stained didn't come out to be 
the right color as planned.

We had the gal at Lowe's- that is pretty good about adusting colors- play around with adding come colorant.  She added some black and a 
reddish/brown. It got a bit grayer than we
expected but at that point we decided to 
go with it. 

I came out and Dan was brushing on the new 
color but it looked really blah.

I grabbed a paint brush (that had been badly abused and was all frayed out).  Since he already had one side painted I used the brush to stomp all over the surface which help reduce the solid look and to thin out.  Then for the other sides I randomly applied little dollops of the stain and then started stomping the finish 
rapidly. By the time I was finished on a side the
brush was fairly dry.  

 This cement stain is very loose and runny, 
not thick like paint.  

It turned out interesting.  

I think it looks like stone now!

 I'm going to give up on the idea of trying to come close to the fountain color.   This new version seems to pick up on the natural stone look that we have everywhere, which seems like a good enough way to go!

Now on to the other pieces- I hope they turn out well!

 I did break down and bought a mum plant...

Seeing a whole sea of them at the garden center was too much for me to resist!  I found the crate at a grain store where we get our bird seed from.  A local person is making them!  It will gray out as the years go by.  I think I'll leave it natural and let nature take it's course! I haven't finished decorating with it yet so this is
 all I'm showing!

 Have a great weekend!

Liz

Labor Day -Relax? Nah...

Earlier this summer we picked up some concrete stain and intended to give all my cement pieces a clean up and new color.  I have various landscape accents made of cement but purchased from different sources and different years.  

They all had their own color and we wanted them to look closer to the color of the fountain. 

So Dan got a bun on to try a couple of pieces and see how they'd turn out.  I chose these large pedestals.  They always had this funny white cast to them almost as though they had paint on them.  They did have a nice green patina that I liked but it had to be bleached off. 

Getting started

The stain is supposed to soak into the cement a bit but because these are at least 1- to 12 years old he warned me they wouldn't grab the color like fresh cement would.  Note the slight greenish cast in the color, which we wanted.

Interestingly enough when placed out where they go- they suddenly took on a more blue/green cast.  The color is called Graystone but we had hoped for a color 

closer to tones in the fountain.

We've decided to take the stain back to Lowe's and custom mix it to see if we can get it closer to what we wanted.   

 I think I should have gone with the color called New England Slate...it definitely didn't come out the way we hoped!  Darn!

Stay tuned...