howdy folks, Kirk and Jason here with another tip of the day, for you folks who want to be
creative and you have fireplaces in your house, I'll tell you what this fellow got and i'll tell
you why we're here, now he's got the fireplace so what he did is he put plywood he put the studs,
he put the plywood then he put wonder board can you plaster over wonder board? Sure you can
but what he did is he put two coats of structural light plaster over that and then come up with
this and then what he did is he mixed up some blue-gray he wanted to match this color up here
and blue-gray, is uh i'm looking for my color chart I'll show you that in a minute so we just
got here and what i did is i looked at it i felt it and i said how smooth you want it? Smooth no
problemo, what we're going to do is and what the the variations of color first of all is because
of the suctions guys if you're going to put a color coat over you know it's a maintenance-free
exterior color coat if you're going to put it over any substrate that substrate has got to be
uniform in suction, meaning, say if i was to do this the first time i could put water here and
if i notice it absorbing a lot here then i just keep putting it keep adding water with a brush
you could paint water on you just keep putting it on but the idea is the suction should be similar
i don't want to go the water route because it sometimes varies so what i'm going to do is i'm
just going to use plaster weld, Plaster weld is by Larson, it's a bonding agent it will allow us
to put a color coat surface over this color coat surface, do i need a bonding agent for that? no
but what i'm using this bonding agent isn't to bond the next coat, it's to kill the suction,
because when i'm done i want it solid, i want it as solid as you can get a dark color
so what we did first is, if i if i just started uh or if i had just went over everything right now
without showing you what i'm doing you wouldn't be able to see all these light and dark patches
it's kind of ghosted through, but we're going to correct that now what i'm going to do guys
is i'm going to do my sides and the only thing i'm going to show you guys is i'm just going
to apply it on the face right here and i'll show you how to do that how to steel trowel it
and how to get a uniform finish and by the way guys this up here this is there's a lot
of plywood still showing so we mixed luminite with a color finish can you do that sure if you have a
luminite that's an accelerator and we patched in one inch up here, so i'm i'm kind of killing time
i've got to let that set in order for me to hit it with the bonding agent, like this i want to hit it
so it's set so none of that grit comes off because when you're doing a fine finish or
a steel trial finish one piece of grit can beat you up meaning we all this little stuff right here
we i scraped this all down scraped the sides down taped everything and i got rid of the grit,
because my trowel will grab a piece of grit and it'll just make a line straight to it
and instead of me being here 45 minutes, i'll be here two hours anyway i'm going to show you
something outside because a fella asked me he says kirk you never show how you mix the
color finishes we actually have but since ca is all set up on the outside we'll show you that too
all right guys real quick, here's a finish coat materials. They come the sand is already separated
so like this is 20/30 that just means it's it's medium sand you can get 30/30 which is fine Santa
barbara or Marble and you can get the heavy sand which is 16/20. that's uh pretty coarse and here
is how you mix guys this is a La Haber color chart because i'm fond of La Habra how many color
charts or how many manufacturers of colors do they have? you've got, La Habra, Western, Carson, Bmi,
and i can go on for a long time but here's how you do it guys you take a 94-pound sack you put
this in two buckets two five-gallon buckets it will fill each one you take this two-pound
box of color two two-pound pack of color. you separate it now you got whatever desired color
you want for lighter colors you use a base 100 for darker colors you use a base 200 and since
we're going with the blue-gray this is a base 200. Now everybody knows that! Anyway, I'm gonna, Jay's
gonna mix me up some mud and i'm gonna go ahead and get busy in there and show you guys how we
uh make the color uniform all right guys we are ready to apply this mud keep in mind guys this is,
La Habra and it does have Lye in it l-y-e what is Lye? if you kneel and lie that's what it does
once or twice because it is toxic, let alone inhale it, don't inhale it always wear a mask,
did i when i was mixing when i was Hod-Carrier? No, but should you? absolutely all right now the
plaster weld is dried up and as i did these two sides as fast as i put it on it sucked right in
so what i did is i hit this with water, now i put more water over the dried plaster weld
and can you use Quikrete, you can use Quickcrete it's easier found too. all right now what we're
going to do is just put a thin finish on here a thin finish and what we want to try to avoid,
is going too far down because we go too far down we're going to get that uh clickers
clinkers are always at the bottom
so what we're going to do also we're going to get i always take my corners around because
i took the side here and i took it around all right so now i go right up to it come
here and i can come down right here they have an insert the insert will cover up to about here, so
now had i not wet this again with additional water right over the pink, Plaster -Weld,
right now it would be set so i'd be putting it on and as fast as i took a stroke it would
be setting, which means it would be drying and these folks here they said well kirk
ah can you guys make it a little bit darker than the current color that's on the chart
so uh Jason what he did was he put
in the bucket, he just added a little bit extra color and that'll darken it a little
bit let me get over here all right turn around and remember when you guys do this stuff if you
do it at the bottom if you put that trowel all the way you'll pick up a grain of sand, that one grain
of sand will just ruin your day because it'll, it'll drag and if it drags uh that's a drag.
I may get a grain of sand and you can see what i'm talking about even though i don't
want to get any sand from the bottom okay so now all i'm doing is i'm still troweling it
still traveling in what you can't see is i'm still troweling it with the intent of
not over trowing it because if i over trowel it then that'll just color it too
so you just kind of got to be consistent guys gals was ever doing this a lot of women call
and say they've done it and it came out great and i thought, wow that's really cool okay so
what we don't want to do is get sidetracked with the corners like that corner it's jagged
leave it alone, leave it alone and finish what you started so,
i'm finishing what i started and my job is to get get the color uniform as possible, because, i told
the fella here, i said well we're working with a 200 base and we're putting the darkest color
blue-gray is one of the darkest colors how many houses have i done in blue-gray about three
and those folks all said they had a hard time selling that house, nobody wants a blue house guys
or a blue-grey house so if you're thinking of
coloring your house come up with a different color. Southern Moss is pretty anything but
blue-gray but on the inside especially matching that works.
not pretty okay now again, we're going to take it right into my own
color that i did this opposite side
it is such a good thing that i put water on this otherwise it would be drying right now guys
i have a few more uh trowel falls and then it's setting and once it starts to set
uh then it can discolor, if i keep playing with it so you don't want
to play with it you just want to get it done get it on even,
okay so a little bit more right here
and this is pretty thick I've gone an eighth of an inch thick
that's about two coats if i'm doing the Santa Barbara so an eighth of an inch it's pretty thick
this is just a good measure here i'm giving myself a little bit of fat, a little bit of fat
mains i can play with it a little bit longer without worrying about it setting up on me.
okay a little bit of extra fat right there because it did set
i can see what i'm looking at camera may not show but i can see what i'm looking at and if i see
something that's already changing to a lighter color then I'll hit it again here's something
to guys if you're spreading an acrylic finish all acrylics stay the same color if you're spreading
a cementitious finish like this they lighten, so like a brick you wet brick
and it gets very dark then when drier conditions occur that brick turns back
into its natural color, all right now what i'm doing guys is i'm wetting this trowel
now here's where it takes a little bit of practice guys because if you wet a trowel
and you're going over a dark surface as fast as you put that on there it's going to look
like Clorox on blue jeans, it'll bleach it so i gotta have this wet and clean
but at the same time not too wet and i'ma start at the bottom, okay taking it one trowel full now.
that gets all the lines out, guys.
and that's done one trowel, you see a little holiday just wet it again and try not to wet
it too much because darker colors will bleed when i say bleed that means they will ghost and change
and it'll be just like what he hired me to fix and once you got it where you like it now you take
your little brush and we brush this the corners here's a tip guys if you're ever going to do this
when you're using a brush on the corner don't do this because then
that'll leave a white streak. take the side just like the side right here and just barely hit that
that way you're only hitting the corner you're not getting both sides of it because it will leave
it'll just discolor it, like again remember the Clorox on the blue jeans you don't want that. So
if i hit it like this with this dark color it'll be noticeable it'll be a big white streak right
there where the rest of it is uh it's good it's dark right now but again when this lightens up
you'll see that it's closer to that and again right here I've got all these clinkers on the side
so i'm going to take the brush on a slant like this guy just if i go like this again I'll have
that streak i don't want to streak we don't want the discoloration because he's already had that
he'll say,, kirk, i hired you a professional and you made it just as bad as i did get out of here.
All right, guys, we are complete with that no homeowner comes and it says wow that's way too
smooth i wanted it sandy, i thought, cute, but if you guys did want it sandy you put your coat
on there you take a sponge float and if i were to hit this right now, all the aggregate would come
out and it would be just like 80 grit sandpaper, it would look really cool also but that's not what
he wanted anyway guys we thank you for watching and as usual we'll see you guys on the next one.
all right folks as always thank you for watching another giordano stucco video if you like what we
do please like and subscribe so we can keep making them and as always we'll see you on the next one