Our Concrete Patio: from filthy to tolerable for under $80

I love our house, and one of the first things I fell in love with when we walked through it early last summer was the patio in the backyard. It's nothing fancy, but it's shaded by these two huge oak trees, and it's situated so there is always a shady spot to sit year-round. It's a simple concrete patio, but it has this nice low brick wall around the perimeter that forms a pretty curve and a nice place for both kids and adults to sit. And while the previous owners had done a great job of fixing up the house before they sold it, they had pretty much just left the patio as it was. It really needed painting. See my before photos:

I didn't think to take any photos before I started cutting in with the paint, but you get the idea. Time and weather had taken their toll and various shades of old paint and the original concrete underneath made for a pretty dirty looking mix. I really wanted to brick-over the concrete, but that would have been a pretty major investment of both time and money. There were other options to consider (trying a true enamel paint or a garage-type epoxy), but they were also fairly expensive and I wasn't sure how they would hold up on our uncovered patio. We ended up using the cheapest oil-based masonry paint we could find, Glidden's Porch and Floor Polyurethane Oil Gloss. This was only about $18 per gallon (we used three), so including some new rollers, a new 1 1/2 inch angle brush for cutting in and some of that sand stuff you mix in with the paint to make it less slippery, I spent less than $80.

Prior to starting this project, I spent maybe 4-5 hours just cleaning and prepping the patio, over the course of a couple of weeks. I used a paint scraper to get up as much of the loose and flaking old paint as a I could, and then I just swept it really well and mopped with some plain soapy water (dish soap, since I wanted it to rinse clean).

With my mom watching the kids, I was able to do a quick sweep of the porch and complete the cutting in and painting in about 3 hours. I went back the next day and did a second coat and I was finished! I'm not really fond of working with oil based paint, mostly just because of the messy clean up. But I've learned to be realistic and just buy myself a brush I'm willing to toss and a disposable roller. And I'm happy with the results so far. We've had a brutally hot summer, and we also keep our kid's wading pool on the patio, so it's constantly getting wet. We also drag our metal patio furniture across it daily and so far it's stood up to all our abuse. And even if it starts flaking a bit later, we can always just scrape off the loose bits and paint another coat. Until we rip it all to add a pool someday...

In the meantime, here are some more photos. I still need to get some nice styled photos of the "after", but somehow it feels really satisfying for me to see these photos of the halfway point. You can see just how yucky the original patio looks and how clean the blue-gray paint is.

On a side note, the paint has really changed the light inside the house. We have a large sliding glass door that opens from our living room onto the patio, and since I painted the light reflects strongly off the patio and up onto the ceiling of the living room. It reminds me of last winter when we had snow(!) covering everything for nearly a week. I had never experienced the effect of all that sunlight reflecting off the white ground and up into the house from below. Interesting and lovely. Also, as a stay-at-home mom of a two and four year old, just being able to listen to my iPod and paint, uninterrupted, was pure bliss. I love working on projects like these and just wish my mom was closer so I could do this more often - thanks Mom!