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Recently we were involved on an interesting project in Duluth, Ga., that was far from a relaxing summer vacation. Mike and Kim Speach of Tropical Toppings, Mike Miller and Kelly Burnam of the Concretist, and Lee Ann and I of Decorative Concrete Institute joined forces on a very creative collaborative effort at a Whole Foods store.

As much as I wish we could have been floating down the Chattahoochee in an inner tube with a cold brewsky instead, we spent a good percentage of the time on our hands and knees grinding concrete along this 900-lineal-ft.-project. Our scope of work was to recreate the Chattahoochee River throughout the outer perimeter of the entire interior floor complete with interesting graphics and certain points of interest along the river, complete with five lakes.

What made this project unique was the fact the entire floor had previously been polished to a 3,000-grit finish, and during the polishing process an epoxy had to be used to fill all the voids in the concrete. What this meant, is that we had an extremely dense surface as a starting point for us to perform our artwork. Prior to mobilizing onto this project in order to best represent the river, our team had to conduct interviews with the upper Chattahoochee River keeper as well as various authors and historians to gather enough information to accurately include this historical information on the floor. One of the major challenges was to come up with a formula of constructing this job with aesthetics in mind, but durability as well.

The project was built with the intention that as time passes and maintenance crews clean and buff the floor the river actually takes on a natural patina. After countless phone conversations and meetings of the minds, we were in agreement that scarifying attachments on the bottom of grinding machines combined with a whole lot of hand grinding was the most efficient way of obtaining an aggressive profile for our epoxy to stick to. The project started off with an area of the floor in which countless samples were produced to obtain all of the necessary coloring and application techniques. After two plus days of sampling, we were off on our journey down the Chattahoochee.

Once all of the necessary layout was transferred to the floor, we would come behind with our scarifiers, which cut a path at the narrowest point of roughly 20 in. Anything narrower had to be ground by hand. Also, where the scarifier was used it did not provide enough of a ridge to contain the epoxy, which meant hand grinding a lip on both sides of the 900- ft.-long river.