Polished concrete can be beautiful for interior floors, but after a while, it can start to look lackluster. When that happens, you may want to refinish your floors. If you're thinking about refinishing your polished concrete, there are several tips that can help to make the process go more smoothly. Take a look at these essential ideas for polishing concrete.

Remove Old Coatings

Before you polish the concrete, you need to remove anything that has built up on the concrete. You may need to use a solvent to remove stubborn sticky elements. Additionally, you may want to use a professional cleaning tool.

Figure Out the Hardness

To determine what setting you use on the concrete polisher, you need to test the hardness of the concrete. There are a few tools that can help with this. One is a durometer tester and another is a concrete rebound tester. Both will instantly give you a hardness reading, which you can then enter into your concrete polishing machine.

However, these tools are both expensive. Luckily, there is a set of hand tools that are much more inexpensive that can also work. Basically, you use these tools to scratch the floor, and you determine the hardness of the concrete by which tool scratches the floor. For example, if you try a number three, but it doesn't scratch, you try the next tool in your kit. Then, if the four makes a scratch, you know your hardness level is between three and four, and you can set your polisher accordingly.

Leave Time to Go Over the Floor Twice Some people see a concrete polishing machine, and they assume that because it is so large and powerful that they will only need to go over the floor once. This is not true. In most cases, you need to leave time to go over the floor twice.For the first time, use a rough grind. Then, on your second pass over, you are going to use the finer grit that leads to the polishing.

Consider a Chemical Hardener After your first grind, you may want to apply a chemical hardener. This may sound counter intuitive. Why would you make the concrete harder right before you plan to grind it? However, the extra hardness makes the polish more effective, and the final results will be shinier and nicer.

If you really want to have a professional looking finish, you may want to skip renting a machine, and just pay a professional to do your concrete polishing for you.