Having a lake in your backyard, you want to sit outside, watch the boats go by and the fish jump! Our back deck is an elevated concrete slab that was finished with a pebble finish that has been smoothed with epoxy, however, it has seen better days! This leads us to our first project, removing a 20+ year old pebble epoxy finish that has not been maintained and exposed to the elements the whole entire time. It was flaking off small pebbles to the point that you could sweep them off with a broom. A first project while it was still nice out was to get it down to the concrete slab below. We first started by utilizing an ice pick and a flat shovel to simply scrape off as much of the loose items as possible, a lot of it simply came up in sheets.
After removing most of the loose rock we then rented an electric Tile Remover from our local home supply store, Menards for about $30 for 4 hours and $10 for a blade to scrape off the surface material. This machine is heavy so bring a friend if you plan on renting one from your local home store! While the machine did it’s job slaying away at the pebble epoxy finish there was still a good bit of manual labor involved to help the machine do its job, although nothing majorly strenuous. To round out getting off all the really ingrained pebbles we used some epoxy remover from Jasco. When using this epoxy remover it is very important to read and understand all directions for its use, as it can be very dangerous! All in all this first project took us the better part of a day in the summer heat, but hey at least we had a nice lake to look out over while we worked!