Polished concrete

Polished concrete is like magic that turns a boring gray floor into a shiny, smooth and reflective surface that looks super cool. To make it, you first pour concrete – this is like making a cake mix, but with sand, rocks, and cement instead of flour, sugar and baking soda. You let the concrete dry for a while until it's hard like a rock.

Then comes the fun part – polishing! You use special machines that have big round paddles with sandpaper on them, and they spin around and around and rub on the surface of the concrete, making it smoother and shinier. The sandpaper starts out rough, like sandpaper you might have used to sand a block of wood, but as you go on, they get finer and finer, like sandpaper that you would use for a very delicate job.

After all that polishing, you can have different finishes for your concrete depending on how shiny or how much pattern you'd like. It could be just shiny and a solid color, or it could have swirls or lines, or little bits of shiny rock or glass mixed in.

Polished concrete is becoming more popular nowadays because it is super tough, durable, and easy to clean up – perfect for schools, hospitals, and other high-traffic buildings. Plus, it looks really cool!