There is a fix in this post about the paste wax and what it was used for. You will see what was originally written with a strikethrough through the words, and after is what was revised.
I know I said awhile back that I would have the tutorial for the kitchen project and the concrete countertops on here soon, and that was a few months back. I'm splitting the kitchen project into smaller tutorials, so there will be a few. This one is the start of the concrete countertops, so final pictures will be posted after awhile, I want to clean and de-clutter my kitchen before taking pictures of it... you know, so it looks nice. I'm not a slob, my kitchen is just well used and sometimes there is a spill or some dirty dishes... you know, like normal people's kitchens. Well, enough about my cleaning habits, onto the tutorial.
These first four pictures are of my husband placing together existing cabinets to make an island. We had a peninsula of cabinets and decided that we did not like the layout and we would much rather have an island, plus, where the peninsula was connected to the sink counter was where the dishwasher had to go. Yes, we didn't have a dishwasher when we moved in, but it didn't deter us.
Here is our new hot glue gun. My little pink one wasn't going to cut it for this project. We used the hot glue gun to glue together some wood slats to make the template for the molds, as you can see above in the first four pictures. The molds are the next four pictures.
After gluing down the boards for the molds and adding a bead of silicone to the edges to round out the corners of the countertops, we added paste wax to the whole mold to make sure the concrete would release from the mold easily. After gluing down the boards for the molds, my husband added a layer of the paste wax to all of the corners of the countertops. This is so the bead of silicone can be rounded out with the edge of a PVC pipe (to give it a nice edge) and the excess silicone can be pulled away easily from the boards.
Here's the concrete mixer that we rented from The Home Depot.
Here is James mixing up the concrete, it is a dusty job.
We had to pour the concrete real fast, so I didn't get many pictures of that. We needed a textured roller, so we use package tape and taped straws to a paint roller so it would put bumps into the wet concrete.
Here's James pouring some concrete, you can see the bars in the countertop for the sink. We put the bars on either side of the sink to reinforce the thinner parts of the countertop.
After pouring, we covered the molds with plastic so it wouldn't dry out so fast.
So, after the countertops set, we took them out of their molds and checked to see how they turned out.
We then mixed up some cement, which is concrete without the aggregate. The cement is used to fill in little pock marks left from air bubbles.
I have pictures of the countertops mounted with a clear, shiny epoxy coat on them. I didn't get any pictures of us applying the epoxy coat because we had to work real fast on that process before the epoxy set. The next post will be final pictures of the countertops mounted in the kitchen.
Please stay tuned. Happy Imagining!
