Here I am last week, standing proudly after scaling the slopes of lower Mount Davidson. (This is to give a sense of scale, please excuse the moronic pose).
Friday was rainy all day, but I was able to revive the various weed sprayers and squirt bottles I used on the other mountains for staining, and also get the new stain for this one. Saturday was laying the base coats (3 colors), and today was road darkening and touching up.
I use 3 cheap Ortho weed sprayers to put on a tan, dark brown, and some yellow, in various stages. This was great for covering a lot of area, and you can go back and spray another color until it looks right. Then I did darkening of gullies and depressions with a hand spray bottle of darker mud-like paint, also using a water spray bottle to do edge blending. This was the approach I used on the other mountains.
However, I was kinda underwhelmed with Saturday’s results. But today for the roads and touchup, I used a sponge and some sponge brushes, which gave a lot more control. After sponging stain on (in a dark and a light brown), I removed excess and blotted with paper towels until it seemed like it was blending in. I couldn’t use a water spray bottle much, because too much moisture tended to mess with Saturday’s layers.
Along those lines, the overnight rain has been messing with the stain, so I covered the mountain with tarps and drop cloths for now.
BTW, I’ve been using Valspar water-based concrete stain, solid color. Maybe with some tinting with black or red acrylic I have laying around. All has been watered down 1 part stain to 1.5 or 2 parts water, to be able to use the sprayers and paper towel blotting / blending.
Linda says the rocks in the mortar look better blended in with the rest of it, and I have to agree. So I won’t be pressure washing all those outcroppings after all, just the retaining wall rocks. This change in course prevents the pressure washing to also remove the stain from the concrete, putting me back at square one.
One final point, and Linda agrees, under direct sunlight all this will all look lighter; and will probably bleach some, like the other mountains. This photo indicates those differences in contrast. The road almost disappears in direct sunlight!
So I can’t guarantee how visible the roads will end up being, or the darkened gullies, or whatever. One thing I can say is that this thing is now stained, and it is what it is, and I’m happy to get past this stage.
More to come…
Thanks for viewing…
===:>Cliffy
