Shouldn't this be simpler?

When you come in to the restaurant I hope you notice the floor. For a simple slab of concrete it sure became a pain in my a&& in January. We knew the floor had issues. In order to seal it to meet health code, we would have to grind it. "Grinding" the floor removes the top few millimeters of concrete. The floor grinder looks like your standard janitor floor buffer on steroids, which is a fair comparison. Once ground, the floor should be ready to finish.


To keep a long story short, the grinding worked but the finish process didn't. A chemical reaction (or two, or more) caused the floor to be cloudy and several professionals to claim "I've never seen this before". The remedy? Take it all off and start over. back to the grinding. What should have taken a week took almost a month and we lost valuable construction time, but there was no option to fix it later.

I describe the finished look as "leathery". The light colored specks you see in some photos are the aggregate (gravel) in the concrete. Normally you wouldn't see them, but they show themselves after grinding. Except for the time, this is what we had hoped for. Here are some photos of the finished project.

Next: cabinets and equipment.