| On another project, Ralston got into a swimming pool with a group of plasterers and had his helper hand him buckets of various color hardeners so that he could throw and mix them intothe white plaster mix. "After about an hour of that those plaster guys wanted to kill me," Ralston says, but he finally convinced them, in his best Spanish, that the owner wouldn't pay anyone unless he was able to make the swimming pool look like an ocean tide pool. They allowed him to continue and the results were applauded.
Ralston uses a myriad of different coloring systems, including dust-on colors, acid and acrylic stains, and universal tints, as well as colors from a multitude of different manufacturers. "On certain projects we have gone to art stores and bought tubes of acrylic paint, mixed them, and used them with sea sponges to go onto floors," he says. 'Then we sealed them with a good polyurethane." On one project, Ralston ran out of black color and used shoe polish. "That was six years ago and it is still black."
He has been creative behind the scenes as well, where he and his office staff have developed a software package called job Manager. "This software allows the entry of literally thousands of detail items," he explains. "We may have a house that has a driveway with bands that are Oyster White with Antique Amber acid stain, and the panels are Victorian Swirl finish with a Sandstone color hardener."
All this data can be entered into the program, and with one click of the button a bid is created. "Although the program was expensive and took some time to develop in-house, it has brought a huge benefit to TRC," he says. "For example, we can track pours, and mix designs, record client conversations, check payment schedules, and more. It even has a place to record the temperature of the concrete and note what the weather was like on the day of the pour. We constantly feed it with information to help us grow our business intelligently." The software was a $60,000 investment.
Ralston believes that most people working in the decorative concrete industry are pioneers. "You can become very creative out of necessity when you have $15,000 or $20,000 on the line," he says.
Recently, while working on a thintop overlay, the wind started blowing bits of bark onto the site. "The pieces didn't really reveal themselves until we poured the Ardex. Because the bark was much lighter than the Ardex, they began to float to the surface. With Ardex we only have about twenty minutes and after that you are done."
The crew had to get on their hands and knees to fish out all the bits of bark. "The longer you wait, the harder it gets. Trowel marks will remain and the product refuses to self level," Ralston says. "We had one area that had all of these trowel lines. The next day we went in and cut score lines every two feet on center. After, we sanded the trowel lines that were most noticeable, and made it look like a pattern that was designed in the entry." In the decorative industry, one needs to be inventive out of necessity, he says, adding that "many a project gone awry has prompted us to restore it with a creative effort."
<<<BACK
TO PRESS | PAGE NUMBER:
1 | 2 |
3 | 4 | NEXT PAGE >>> |
