Home Repair: Front Stoop Glow-Up!

I had been meaning to refinish our front stoop for a couple of years, and was inspired by the Home Repair contest to finally get it accomplished with the supplies I purchased a year ago. We've done a bunch of other projects, from landscaping to replacing the front door, so it was high time to finish this quick repair and make it all look new. Follow along to learn how to remove fake grass and its nasty adhesive from concrete, prepare the surface for the appropriate paint or stain, and learn how to stain concrete to make it look heaps better!

Prep supplies:

1. Scraper (a wall scraper like this one works best)
2. Sanding tools such as a random orbit sander, flooring sander or wire wheel
3. Wire brush
4. Broom or small brush
5. Masking tape
6. Plastic or cardboard for masking
7. Optional: Hot water or adhesive stripper
8. Optional: Leaf blower

Painting supplies:

1. Acrylic paint made for stairs
2. Acrylic stain made for concrete
3. Rust Reformer spray paint
4. Heavy Duty outdoor spray paint
5. Mini roller
6. Nap roller (for paint)
7. Foam roller (for stain)

Since you'll be doing some painting outdoors it is a good idea to check the weather for the day you'll be doing your project and the following day. Most of the paint or stain we'll be using needs a few hours to cure, and if it looks like it's going to rain you should hold off.

Additionally, it is annoying to do this type of work when it is windy - your spray paint will fly all over the place and leaves and debris will land on any flat surface no matter how hard you try to avoid it. Pick a calm, clear day that is not too hot nor too cold, in the 60-80 degree Fahrenheit range. It's slightly better if it's overcast but that's not absolutely necessary - you'll just have to keep an eye on how fast your paint is drying as you apply it.

If you have a metal railing and it's like mine was, the amount of surface rust on it just makes it look really rough. Mine did not appear to have any deep pits or sections where the rust had corroded completely through the metal, which is great and meant that I could get away with painting it without having to weld or repair anything. In most situations when I've refinished rusty metal, I've used a chemical like Evapo-Rust and then sandpaper or a wire wheel to remove any remaining rust and paint.

Given how complicated the architecture of the railing is and how much work that would be, I decided to use a product called Rust Reformer. This special spray paint is designed to encapsulate the rust and bind to it, making it so that the rust won't spread any more and allowing paint to stick to it. You should take a wire brush and make sure that any really loose sections of rust are removed, and that the surface is very clean. I brushed it off slightly, but otherwise did not have to do too much surface prep.

I masked off my house siding, but not the plastic grass since I would be tearing that out anyways. I applied the rust reformer in two light coats about 10 minutes apart. The instructions say to let it cure for 24 hours before applying the top coat, so I left it alone and tried not to touch it as I was removing the carpet. Make sure to apply the product in light coats and move quickly with the can to avoid paint runs.

I came back the next day after doing one coat of paint on the stairs and applied two coats of Ace Rust Stop satin black spray paint. I masked around the posts that go into the concrete and placed a piece of plastic sheet over the new paint on the stairs to minimize overspray.

This was by far the most time consuming part of what was otherwise a very quick project. The plastic grass that was glued to my front stairs had likely been applied about 30 years ago (it came with the house when we bought it), which was pretty helpful since some of the adhesive was starting to crumble. I distinctly remember applying something like this to my grandfather's house with him in the 90s, and boy the adhesive that we used is some gnarly, sticky stuff!

Fortunately for me, much of the plastic carpet came off without too much of a struggle and I just had to scrape some sections of the adhesive off the concrete. When doing research for this project on how to remove it, one piece of advice that I came across was to pour boiling water on it - this will soften the adhesive to make it easy to remove if yours is very stuck. I didn't need to try this, but I bet it would work very well.

The best thing that worked for my purposes was a wall scraper with a fresh blade. The surface area and sharp blade made getting large chunks of the adhesive off the concrete pretty easy. My tip for using any scraper or flat blade like this is to constantly flip it over - you "sharpen" one edge of it as you scrape against the surface, and flipping it over works the other side so that you continually have a sharp surface to scrape with. It really works very well, even with those small flat razor blade scrapers.

Once I got all of the loose adhesive scraped off, which was about 90% of it, the rest I decided to slightly sand down and leave. It was bonded really well to the concrete, and with a slightly etched surface I'm not too worried about the paint coming off of it. Since the paint I'll be using has a bit of texture to it, any of the adhesive bits that are left won't be too visible. I tried a random orbit sander with 80 grit paper (was out of 60 grit), a wire wheel on an angle grinder and a belt sander with 36 grit paper on it. The random orbit did the best job, with the belt sander coming in second. The wire wheel mostly melted the adhesive and left a shiny patina on the concrete.

If you are keen on getting every last bit, a product called Citristrip is what I would recommend - I've used it for removing really old paint, and it's one of the best adhesive/paint removers that exist. It's not as toxic as some of the other solvents, smells like oranges, and if you apply it and wrap in saran wrap and leave it overnight it can remove anything.

If you don't have to remove any paint or crusty plastic grass, good on you! Clean the surface well of dirt and debris and any grease or oil and skip straight to painting.

I spent some time as a professional painter, and our saying was, "Quality painting is 90% prep work." I always appreciate how quickly it goes when you get past the cleaning, masking, and surface prep and finally get to enjoy the transformation of painting something!

If you are using a paint rather than a stain, I highly recommend something that is intended for exterior concrete. The paint I used - Insl-X Sure Step Acrylic Paint in light gray - has a gritty texture to it to prevent it from being slippery and is designed to adhere to concrete. If you use a regular latex house paint you will be repainting the surface in a couple of years, maybe sooner. Many garage floor epoxies are not intended for the vertical surface of the stairs, so I would also avoid those. Additionally, the sandy texture of the paint I chose makes the stairs safe to walk up and down when it's icy or wet.

I simply masked off the side of my house that was really close to the stoop with masking tape, made a sharp edge at the bottom of the stairs with a section of tape, and then used a cut-in brush and mini roller with a nap roll to apply the paint. It's thick, goopy stuff so it went on in two thick coats. I let the paint dry overnight to make sure that it was ready for the second coat, since the recoat time on the can indicated 8 hours or more.

If you are waiting a long time between coats of paint, it's best to store the brush in a small plastic ziploc bag and put a plastic bag over the roller - that way the paint won't dry on them and gum them all up. I also like to use tinfoil in my roller pan - a small sheet of it makes it so very little paint attaches to the pan, and you throw it away when you're done. This makes a roller pan last for a very long time with much less buildup!

I had to get creative to keep the tree from dropping bits of debris into my wet paint, and took a piece of plastic and wrapped it around the tree to help prevent this.

As part of this glow-up, I also wanted to improve the appearance of the concrete border of our front planter. If you choose to stain your concrete stairs instead of paint them with a textured paint, everything in this step applies to you.

The texture of the concrete that was poured for this planter was pretty rough, which means that it has a lot of surface area. I chose to stain it rather than paint because of this. To prep the surface, I just scrubbed it quickly with a wire brush, then brushed off the remainder and used a leaf blower to blast out all of the dust. Mostly what I needed to remove was living and dead lichen that was growing on the concrete - in my test patch, the yellow lichen was showing through even two coats of the stain.

The concrete stain I used was Insl-X Tuffcrete Solvent Acrylic stain in Gray Pearl.

After the surface was cleaned and free of dust, I simply applied the concrete stain with a mini roller and foam brush. For the roller, I used a foam roll because the stain is very runny. This worked extremely well, and I could apply enough product to soak into the concrete pores for both of my two coats.

To keep the stain from bleeding onto my concrete sidewalk, I used a piece of cardboard to soak up drips. It was mostly successful, I had a few spots that it bled behind but this area is always covered in dirt and leaves anyways so I'm not too worried about it.

I'm pretty happy with how this project turned out for how easy and quick it was to do and just what a difference it makes. I bet I spent maybe 5 hours in total to get it done, with about half of that being the adhesive and carpet removal. It really ties together the front of our house, and adds a really fresh new look to the place that I've already gotten comments about from the mailman and the neighbors!