When you think of landscaping for your yard, your thoughts likely turn to grass, flowers and bushes. You might even think of carefully-arranged rocks, fancy flower pots, and even raised flower beds.

But your hard surfacing like your driveway, pathways and patios shouldn’t be neglected either. And when you’re reading to upgrade any of these, stamped concrete is a great material to choose.

Why Choose Stamped Concrete

There are a lot of advantages to choosing stamped concrete for your outdoor surfaces. In fact, it can even be used indoors – anywhere that you can use concrete, such as a basement rec room floor, stamped concrete offers an improved look.

This material offers all the benefits of any concrete – it’s durable, easy to maintain, and long-lasting. It will hold up to the weather and to regular traffic, both foot traffic and vehicular.

Not only is it practical, though, it’s also beautiful. Stamped concrete imitates the look of other fine materials that are usually more expensive and often more fragile.

You can choose a design like cobblestone, hewn stone, brick, or stone tiles. You can even have a wood plank design that looks realistic right down to the grain!

Stamped concrete isn’t an image painted on the surface, though; it’s a design that’s imprinted into the concrete. That means it has real depth and texture to it. In fact, it easily fools most people unless they are looking for it!

Price is another advantage. You can install this decorative product for prices that beat most other materials.

Obviously, it’s a bit more expensive than plain concrete because of the extra work involved in making it decorative.

But it comes in under the natural stone or other surface it’s designed to look like while providing benefits you can only get with concrete.

How Stamped Concrete Is Created

The process of stamping concrete is only a few decades old. New patterns are added all the time to make the product even more appealing.

The process starts with regular concrete. A base color is added to it. Some contractors do this while the concrete is mixed, although it can also be added once the concrete is poured.

In the latter, there is a more consistent coloring throughout the concrete’s surface.

While the concrete is still wet, stamps in your chosen pattern are used to imprint a design into the surface. That means you get a real, “3D” surface. It has real lines where the “bricks” or “tiles” come together.

Once the stamping is done, secondary colors are added to highlight joints or grout. From there, the concrete dries and you have a…