Nords--did you do the concrete work yourself? It looks great!
Holy cannoli, thanks but no way. This is an order of magnitude outside my circle of competence.
The concrete contractors, an average of three guys a day for three weeks (as many as six some days) crawled over every square inch of it on kneepads at least once.
This project was eight years in the planning and only affordable/available because of the recession. Last fall we had a welder replace three rusted-out wrought-iron gates around our lanai & sidewalks. Last February we had a lanai jackhammered out and re-poured to get the slope done right. (After the old lanai was torn out, I fixed two undiscovered sprinkler leaks that had contributed to sidewalk cracking.) We also had concrete poured over the first dozen crumbling lava-rock steps down our back slope to achieve a better rise/run and to level the treads. That's a lot safer now, to say nothing of better on my aching knees.
Then in late March we had the FuturaStone scraped off two more lanai, two sidewalks, and a driveway. This required a device the size of a forklift with scraper blades, accompanied by hammer drills and lots of sweat/dirt/noise over three days. (Kids, stay in school.) Next we had one of the sidewalks properly sloped away from the house (by adding over an inch of concrete at the foundation) and we had the driveway cut into four smaller slabs to stop its cracking. I took the opportunity to trench 75 feet through the palm roots around the newly-leveled sidewalk to backfill it with gravel.
After everything had been scrubbed clean, etched, and all the cracks & joints filled, the contractors poured a quarter-inch of dyed concrete on top and stamped it with rubber molds. More stain on top for contrast, a couple coats of acrylic sealer, new stress-release joints cut on top of the old, and filled with caulk.
We kept the FuturaStone on our garage floor because it's in better shape (no direct sunlight) but it was still filthy. A neighbor, the island's best carpet cleaner, went over it with his truck-mounted machine from hell that uses boiling hot water, rotary brushes, and vacuum extraction. The sand/dirt clogged his filter seven times and produced over 200 gallons of chocolate milk. Hopefully we don't have to do that again for another 20 years.
The day after the concrete was finished we sprung a water leak at the tee from the street pipe to the house/sprinkler connections. So I had to chisel out a square foot of that brand-new concrete to [-]bail out[/-] excavate the connections and fix them. Instead of pouring more concrete we just put a grate over the hole in case it starts leaking again.
Recessions are great for home-improvement projects. I'm happy to have all those nagging engineering problems resolved. Spouse is thrilled with the looks and cooler surfaces, so she's moving on to the next phase of replacing the (small) side yard with El Toro zoysia. I highly recommend stamped concrete for recovering from other ugly artificial surfaces, but check back with me in a year to see how it's wearing.
So thank you, it's gorgeous and way better than what we used to have, but I sure don't want to have to do that again in my lifetime...
