My son and his family bought a new house close to us that needed some remodeling. He is concentrating on upgrading the master bath and adding a second floor laundry. I’ve been spending most of my time helping out with small fixes.
The kitchen cabinets are inexpensive thermo plastic covered and the countertops were linoleum. He read about a technique that used feather coating cement to update old cabinet counters to make them look like cement counters.
I decided to start the project. I removed the smallest counter to try the technique. All that is required is a box of Henry patching cement from Home Depot and a plastic trowel. Along with an orbital sander and various grits of sandpaper.
First the laminate is roughed up with 60 grit paper. Then a small batch of cement is mixed 2 parts cement to one part water and allowed to slake for a few minutes then remixed. Then the cement is spread on the counter. A bit thicker cement is needed for the edges so waiting a bit for the batch to harden a bit works then the cement is smoothed down with a plastic drywall trowel. I also tried a metal trowel and a silicone scraper I used for the epoxy finish on my kitchen counters.
The first coat is sanded a bit with a medium heavy grit. I used 100.
The process of troweling on the coats seemed to add groovesin the cement. I tried various sanding tools. By hand and with the diamond pads and polisher. That came out with scratches too. But fewer ridges.
After at least five coats of cement and sanding to 1500 grit including a wet sand I decided to try sealing.
After three coats of sealer I put it back on the counter to judge my work.
I didn’t like it. Too many remaining ridges and color variation.
It looked a bit better from further away.
But I took it off and sanded off the sealer to add yet another coat of cement and more sanding so that I could try cement stain. I ordered charcoal gray. It mixes with water and I applied it in two coats.
One coat seems to even out the coloring. Now the second coat is drying.
In the meantime we found three big slabs of Corian Zodiaq which is their quartz product and decided to abandon the micro-topping project entirely.
It’s exactly what I would have picked for the kitchen. So now I just have to cut and fit it!