hey everyone uh behind me you can see made some progress and the countertops are in show you how I did it so I'm going to show you how we are going to get ready to pour these concrete counters uh we got one done got the island poured um still got the bracing on it to give it some extra strength and hopefully take those off later today and get a sealer put on this but main focus today is to get this concrete poured before it gets too cold and so I'm going to show you how I went ahead and prepped all this I'm going to have about 55 square feet or so to pour today again I'm using the concrete countertop Solutions products they're specifically their liquid um additive that you put in a sand topping mix and I'm using their forms and form liners and all that so how quick overview how to how to really set this up and prep this for for your pour so the first thing we did was get the concrete cement board and screw it on I use the 4x8 shito into a supply store and got a big four base sheet so I didn't have any seams in any of my tops went ahead and screwed that in with cement board screws I'm doing a stone face and so I need the countertop to overhang further because I need to over I need the countertop to overhang the stone and so you have to account for that when you install your cement board and so I'm installing my cement board an inch and a half past the face of my stone lifts the cabinets then once you put the concrete countertop Solutions forms on that adds another inch and a half so that gets here on three inches but then once you put these form lanters in you you lose a little bit of depth and so my overhang is going to be somewhere around 2 5 8 2 and a half or so once I get everything said and done and that should be nice for when I put the stone on which is around two inches I'll still have an inch or so overhang on the on the countertop compared to the stone so that's one thing to think about um the other thing is how the system works is you put these front faces on and then once it's done you just snap these off and we'll show you I'll show you that process later but then you also have to run this back Edge on on this particular setup on this cabinet I didn't have my my back wall is a little bit be away from this concrete block wall so I didn't have anything to screw into so I just used I just set it down and I used some silicone sealant to kind of stick it in place and that seems to have worked fine so just put that along the back because that's what you're going to screed against [Applause] um then once you have every all your forms on again I used number 10. half inch to 5 8 inch depending on what I could find screws you want to screw these forms in about every 10 inches every foot or so um now I did the same thing for the top cap Stones as well I'm going to pour them in place as well I had thought about pouring those in a separate form and then putting them in place but that's going to be a lot of concrete to to try and move without cracking and so we're just going to pour those in place as well um now once you have the forms on then we it's time to put this mesh in place and the trick with the mesh is it's really honestly quite straightforward you have to use these clips that are supplied you want to put them about every 10 inches or so on Square put another row in the middle of your grid and so it's nicely supported because you don't want this to sag when you pour your your sand topping your concrete mix in so if you want to roll out the the mesh fiberglass mesh and it's two feet wide but once you roll it out it's going to want to it's going to want to curl back up because of the roll and so once you roll it out and cut it flip it over and so it naturally wants to roll down that way you don't have to worry about the fiberglass sticking up accidentally curling while you're pouring and sticking up through your finish um that that'll save you a lot of headache down the road and then once you put the the mesh in clip it to all your um your clips that's pretty much it for that um the only other thing to call out here is just if you have an opening like this so this is an opening for a power burner it's a little bit tricky because you need to know your cutout depth but then you also need to know um how far your finish is going to be so I need a 19 inch cut out but my cut out from the face of the cabinet is really only 17 because I'm going to have such a long overhang because of the stone and so my 19 actually ends up being about right here because once I'm done pouring I'm going to use a grinder and I'm going to cut a little Notch out on this countertop so the power burner can slide in place and sit where it needs to um and then to align this custom form I just use a piece of painted boards here or some primed boards the the distance from your cement board to the top should be an inch and 5 8. um so so you can use that as a way to get close or you can set a level across the back form to your front and just install the board to where it touches the bottom of your level and that should be good as well um then the other trick if you don't want to see so if you would take this form off you would see the edge of your cement board here if you don't want to see the edge of your cement board in your finished product what you want to do is like I did here is cut the cement board back about a half inch that way when you pour your countertop mix fills in that Gap and then when you would take this form off you don't see a raw cement board Edge there you see your countertop finish now this will never this Edge will never be seen in my scenario because this power burner is going to cover it all but I went ahead and did it just to try to give it a nice finish so something to keep in mind as well now notice at the top I'm not using uh the Z mesh it's a fairly small again cap what I'm going to do is pour it about half full and then I'm going to lay in some steel reinforcement and then finish the pour so I'm going to use steel reinforcement for that just because it's so small and um should be good enough so overall the prep is quite easy as you can see the last step that I did after putting in the mesh and getting everything set is then you need to put in your form liners if you're using them again I'm using a straight edge form with the rock face form liners and you just need to cut those I use my miter saw cut those a size and then to get them to stick securely what you want to do is wipe the back of the form and also the back of the form liner with some rubbing alcohol and that will uh create a surface that some two-sided double-sided duct tape will stick to and then that will stick very nicely to your form and should stay in place and then once all that's done then where your form liners meet as you can see here just use a little plumber's putty don't use caulk that'll be way too messy hard to form it's going to stick everywhere let's put a little putty right in that corner kind of mold it into place um and that will give you a nice Blended transition uh for your for your countertop Corners Once you pull those forms off and you can notice here this form has been used before or this form liner has been used before um and that's the nice thing about these is that they are reusable so you can probably get a lot of pores out of these if you clean them up quickly after you use them and then the only other is this side so the exact same setup really in the same process just a bigger cut out for the Argentine Grille and down here is the platform the Argentine Grill will sit on I'm going to pour the countertop first then measure the exact depth I need um for the Argentine Grill then I'm going to form this up and and pour that to that to that height so it sits in sits in here nice so that's a pretty much it for the prep work um just got my rosin some paper down on the pavers covered with plastic make sure I don't get a mess anywhere don't need additional work cleaning things up so make sure you take time to do that and then uh then make sure you have you know your work space set up ready to go so I've got two buckets three and a half gallon buckets here ready to uh carry the concrete over and do the pouring I got a mixing bucket here to do the mixing in got my power mixer ready to roll I got my coloring my colorant pigment I'm going for that blue stone-ish look and so it's going to be two ounces of the blue pigment and four ounces of the charcoal black pigment and put that in every 60 pound bag gotta have your liquid additives ready to go one of those per 60 pound bag and then I got my same mix in the back of the truck and ready to roll so yeah make sure you have everything set set up once you start mixing you need to go pretty quick and so having a helping hand is definitely important on this as well so all right well I think that's it we are going to go ahead and set things up and get the pour in the first first uh couple counters I'm going to start at the top and then um go to the bottom just in case as I pour this I'm going to have some overflow probably into the bottom so start the top work to the bottom uh see how it goes [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign welcome back everyone let's give you an update on these countertops so we got everything poured as you have seen and since then um I finished these countertops and I must say I did a heck of a lot better uh finishing this counter versus that one this one I have lots of just unevenness and I needed to polish this one pretty good to get get it pretty smooth but then a lot of your top finish comes off and you start to see a lot more sand so it takes on a little bit different color but took my learnings and applied it to these and I'll tell you these turned out much much better I'm really happy with these so um for the finishing I just used two different tools first one is this magnesium float and you know once you pour it you're going to see some water come to the to the top um which is fine and just leave that water there and let it evaporate and once it evaporates off and it starts just to begin to firm up a little bit that's when you want to use this float and you just want to go um nice arched you know curved patterns all over your surface just to help level out find any low spots if you have a low spot add a little bit of leftover mix you know Pat tap it in you know smooth it back and forth mix it in but you just did that over the entire surface and what this float does is then opens up the pores and the concrete to allow that bleed water to continue to reach the top and it also allows any trapped air to get out and so then um I did that once or twice and then you just let it continue to set and then once it's looking starting to look a little dry and when you lightly touch it you don't leave a mark um but maybe still a little bit soft to a firm touch then you want to go ahead and grab your steel trowel and I just use this maybe 14 inch yeah 14 inch um and then you're going to use pretty hard pressure um back and forth um in a you know straight line arch different directions really to um you know work up the cream on the top of your countertop here and give it a real smooth finish and so um this particular countertop I don't think I'm even going to polish at all it looks pretty good so if I can get me close down the finish it it came out really nice and smooth just very very happy with it um even these smaller tops came out really nice The Rock Edge came out really nice what I will say about the rock Edge is that it is hard to get all the air vibrated out of it and so um just really over vibrate it's you know when you think you're done keep going because I have lots of little you can see but lots of little air pockets it's not it doesn't you know affect the finished product or anything but if you're really picky um you know you may want to make sure we use the reciprocating saw around the edge a couple different times and that still wasn't quite enough with a pretty wet mixture honestly so yeah make sure you really vibrate it a lot to try to get those bubbles out so overall really really really happy with the Finish uh the form snapped off very easily when you're done you just take it you bend the front down the form snap off without damaging any of the countertop and so really where we're at now is we want to move on to the next step which is to get these countertops ready for some sealer and ready to get these some of these appliances put in but before we do that we have a little a few imperfections we want to correct and so these um forms as you're hard troweling or Steel troweling you can build up a little bit of a ridge against the front liner if your mix is just a little bit low and so you can see here on mine maybe if I get down low you can see it but there's a little bit of a lip left on this front edge that you know if water gets on this it's not going to be able to run off that lip is going to try to act as a dam and hold it on there so I'm going to use a 100 Grit pad Diamond pad on my orbital and I'm just going to go around the front edge of these countertops and just try to knock this front lip down so it's not quite as prominent you can really see you know the build up on this one so just going to go around and try to get that knocked off again I'm not going to polish probably the main of these counters I think they look great as they are so um and also this on the color we were going for a match to these wall Stones which is a blue stone color I can't remember the manufacturer but we was kind of hoping to try to get all the cap Stones counters the match and I will say look from that that I think we did pretty darn pretty darn good trying to match the color um and as I said I'm mixing this is four ounces of charcoal uh pigment with uh two ounces of a blue pigment got us this bluish gray blue stone color so let's go ahead and set up and try to sand this Edge down and see how that works [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] um um [Music] so we got sanding's done so all I used was a 100 Grit uh dry Diamond pad and followed it up with a 200 grit and now I don't know if you can tell but the lip is pretty much gone it is pretty smooth all the way down now especially on this end there's quite a bit of a lip oh that's gone so those pads worked quite well for this purpose um you can see there's a little bit of a difference in the Finish obviously from where it was trial to where it was sanded down but um it's not gonna be that noticeable okay so um next step is where it's going to get a some water in the sponge and just clean all this off um get all the dust removed and at that point this should be ready to get my power burner out and we're going to go ahead and cut this countertop back so it slides into place and at that point get it cleaned up and we're ready to seal let's get to it okay so we're out here we have our power burner we need to put in test fit opening looks good but we have a slight modification we need to do to the countertop so that sits in there flush and how it should be you'll see the power burner has this nice kind of overlap on the sides which so when you put it in but that overlap hits your counter and honestly it doesn't look good because the Open Face Rock profile here will sit here and it's going to be gaps and it's not going to look good so what you want to do is have this be inset into the counter a little bit about an inch half inch or inch or so so to um uh get this cut out what we need to do is Mark put it in place and we marked the edge of the power burner on both sides and what we're going to do is just follow that line and cut a Groove and we're going to cut a little Notch out of the countertop on both sides and what that should allow us to do is with that Groove out is Slide the power burner all the way into position and then the countertop should then kind of overlap this front bezel just a little bit giving it a nice clean finished look so that's the plan anyway I got one shot to do this correctly so fingers crossed let's see what happens [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] after a little bit of trial and error we got her in just went slowly taking off a little bit by a little bit and early at the end of the day this is what you're looking for so now it fits in there the front bezel sits back in there on both sides our countertop then comes you know overlaps it a little bit but not too far to where it's sticking out in front of it on both sides so it looks looks good so I'm uh I think I'm happy with that the cut line matches up well there it's a little bit back it's a little bit of a gap there but nothing major and new gaps on the back end sitting nice and flush so I think that's a winner all right so now with that being in we're going to go ahead and just clean everything up vacuum everything off and get ready to seal all the concrete and I'll show you how I do that what product we use all right so we are back for the next step we have the countertops cleaned up blown off we are ready to put the sealer on and so quick uh show you what I'm using I'm using this acrylic 14. from Countertop Solutions it's a water-based product it's a matte finish doesn't does not do much darkening of the surface so it leaves it pretty well the color that it is um with like I said a matte more of a matte finish then I have a Polish or a shine product that you can use after this that'll bring more Shine leave a more of a gloss finish if that's what you're looking for so we're going to go ahead and use this I'm going to use just a standard brush for the edges and I've got this wide roller that I'm going to use for all the flat surfaces and then the only thing I found on these and so because my edges are not smooth obviously with the rock face these are a little bit more difficult and what I've found the easiest way to get these is just to get some on your brush and do your best uh you know Bob Ross impression and and dab into that and that gets in all the uh the nooks and crannies of your rock face there so that's really all that's to it you just let it air dry you can do a coat every hour so this is a very quick process I'm going to do oh probably four coats um on the on all of the countertops and uh we'll see see what it looks like let's get started