How to Stain Concrete Floors – Full Step by Step Tutorial with Video

A full tutorial on how to stain concrete floors yourself. Staining a concrete floor is easy. Follow the step by step tutorial and watch the video on how to stain a concrete patio floor and do it yourself.

Staining concrete floors is relatively an easy task.

I would say it ranks right there with painting a room… if you can paint a room, you can totally stain concrete floors yourself. It makes a great weekend project.

Here is our patio… doesn’t look too great (understatement!)… not only did it need a good wash, it had all kinds of stains and paint splatters
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With it being springtime, I want to start working on the patio to create a space to hang out and enjoy the pool and summer evenings.

The first step to that… cleaning up that patio concrete floor and staining it!

I love how it turned out! Although it isn’t quite like I had imagined in my head because I was hoping to use semi-transparent concrete stain and I ended up having to use solid color stain. You will see why. But I do love how it finally turned out!

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How to stain concrete floors –

A note about this method of concrete staining – it will only work for concrete that is not stamped. If you have stamped concrete, you will need to use a sprayer. The HomeRight FinishMax is great for this.

Here is a video of the whole process. The written step by step instructions and more details follow.

Step 1 – Clean. After a quick sweep, bring in the pressure washer. The patio already looked so much better after the wash. But to my surprise, it was previously stained. I had expected an unstained patio so I could use semi-transparent stain to give it a nice grey color.

Step 2 – Fill cracks. I used premixed concrete that came in a squeeze bottle and it was super easy to fill in small cracks. Make sure to wipe away any excess.

Step 3 – Etch. Using a chemical etcher and cleaner, treat the entire surface of the patio. Follow the directions on your can. For the etcher I used, it called for 50/50 mix with water, a scrub with the broom followed by a good rinse with water. This needs to be left to dry for 24 hours before staining.

This left the surface already looking pretty great, except, the color was very non-uniform. There was no way semi-transparent stain would go on evenly.

Step 4 – Stain. Using the Quick Painter made it super quick and easy to cut in along the edges of the patio and near the walls.

Then, I used the StainStick to apply the stain to the rest of the patio.

The StainStick works pretty much like the PaintStick except there is a stain pad at the end instead of the roller.  The tube loads up on stain directly from the can. It is very convenient because you don’t need to worry about transferring the stain to a tray or reloading the stain pad after every stroke.

The StainStick is also perfect to stain a deck. See all the ways you can use it on HomeRight’s website!

A few notes about staining the concrete patio-

• When staining, don’t swipe in every direction like when painting a wall. That will lead to lots of variation in the color. Ask me how I know ? Thankfully, the second coat in a single direction helped make everything uniform.
• The cracks – they aren’t as visible anymore but the texture of the concrete in the cracks is different from the texture of the rest of the patio, so you can still see the shadows across. But it still looks so much better than with all the cracks.

It feels so much nicer already to hang out on my curbside rescue patio furniture and the DIY outdoor coffee table.

We even got to use the patio this past weekend after about 4 days of drying time! It was a nice warm day and we got to use the pool for the first time this year!

I have a few more projects planned for the outdoors and I am super excited for the summer!

Before I leave, and because we all love before and after pictures, here is one for you!