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My neighbor's plain concrete walkway turned into stamped stone in one weekend, and I watched the whole thing
Two summers back my neighbor Dave had a plain gray concrete walkway from his driveway to the front door, about 20 feet of nothing special. Last April he rented a concrete stamping mat and a bucket of overlay mix for around $400 and went to work. He skimmed the old slab with a polymer overlay, pressed the stamp while it was still wet, then came back the next day with a stain and sealer. Three days of work and it looks like real flagstone from the street, and the whole thing cost him less than a fifth of what a tear-out quote was. Has anyone here done a stamped overlay on a slab that had hairline cracks? I keep hearing it telegraphs through and I want to know if that held true for you.
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alex82013h ago
Picture that hairline crack as a tiny fault line just waiting to ruin your whole weekend project. In my experience, those cracks absolutely do show through a thin overlay because the slab moves with the seasons and the crack opens and closes like a little mouth. Take that with a grain of salt since it depends on how wide the crack is and whether the slab is done moving, but the fix is to fill the crack with a flexible crack filler and maybe lay down a fabric membrane before the overlay goes on. A buddy of mine skipped that step and his "flagstone" now has a perfect highway map running right down the middle. So yeah, it can work, but only if you deal with the crack first instead of pretending it is not there.
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