I have been working on making my kitchen look better. Part of this process was skim coating the old laminate coutertops with Rapid Set Cement All. First I ran a test on some plywood I had laying around. Looking back this is probably where I made a mistake. I should have tested it on some laminate rather than bare wood.
I sanded down the countertops with 80 grit sandpaper on my palm sander as well as going over it by hand to leave some longer scratches for the concrete to grab onto. Despite having prepped the surface and verified that it was indeed scuffed up, the concrete did not stick to the majority of the counter top. There were about three places that the concrete actually stuck and they were small spots.
So it is on to plan B, which is to paint the countertops and then seal them with bar top epoxy. The epoxy was going to be used on the concrete so I already have it and should provide a very sturdy finish. The plus side of this is that painting will take far less time as it dosn’t take near as long to dry and sticks really well to laminate. All in all I’m out about $40 and about 5 hours of time. The paint and materials cost another $40 so even with the epoxy ($66) I’m looking at $146 to resurface my countertops. Thats a fraction of the $1,400 I was quoted to have a professional company come in and resurface them.
