Concrete Countertops: A Learning Experience

A learning experience. Yes, that is what I will call this one. Unfortunately, this blog is all that I have to remind myself of the hours of work, the buckets of persperation, and all the blood. 200lbs of concrete I had to smash up and haul out of the basement.

Would I do it again? Sure.

What would I do differently? I would use thicker wire. My wire needed to be a little more rigid. I would use at least 2" thick concrete. I want to add glass to the countertop. I would use an air hammer. I saw it on TV right after I moved the last of the concrete.

Next weekend project: Tile Countertop....

Concrete Countertops: Attempt #2

This is attempt #2. Amanda and I took hammers and hammered under the mold for around 3 hours. There was no need to workout that night. Our arms were on fire! The above picture shows the mold. What is in the center is my gloves and two pieces of 1 inch foam siliconed together to represent where the sink will go. The size is 45" by 22" total.

So the differences from the first mold. First, the sink was not built in. I purchased some drop in sinks from the ReUse store for $5.00 a piece. It was quite the steal. At the same time we purchased some back splash tile for $5.00 for a complete box. Second, we hammered and did not use the palm sander. Our palm sander did not have the ability to vibrate the bubbles out like we needed to. This was a dramatic improvement. Third, the internal wire support was more straight forward. The other mold had multiple pieces and this one only had one. This was much simpler to make and cut. The final difference was the amount of concrete. The first one took 3.5 bags of concrete. This one took around 2 bags of concrete.

Concrete Countertops: Ready to remove the mold

The above video shows right before the mold is ready to be released. What I did not account for was the weight. There are some videos that say to invite good friends to help you and they will probably ignore any future calls for help. I called on my wife to help me. It weighed over 200lbs! What I ended up doing was creating legs like on the bottom of the form, clamped them on top, and flipped it over. Once it was flipped over we took off the clamps.

While the picture looks like a success there was a major failure that caused me to abandon the countertop. I was not able to get all the voids out of the concrete. There were holes in the back of the sink by the drain. It did work well enough to give a second go at it.

Concrete Countertops: Ready for concrete

This video shows the mold ready to start pouring concrete. There was an additional mold that went around the sink to hold the concrete in place.