prepping very old basement concrete floor

Okay, I decided I want to stain my basement floor. Here is the issue - it is 100 years old and not a pretty site. I don't think it has been clean for 99 years and six months. I have read about surface prep, but all talk about power washing and a hose to rinse the daylights out of it. Well, this is my basement and it does not have a drain in the floor. How the heck can I best wash and rinse enough without flooding it? If I were to hose it down, would it be okay to shop vac up the water? What about all those acids and other chemicals in the prep solutions? I don't really want to sacrifice a shop vac.

Meanwhile I accidentally slopped about some stucko base coat while I was putting it on the walls and that sure stuck to the dirty floor with no problem! :-)

 

To get a half-ass decent stain job, you will need to skim coat the floor. Google skim coat, acid stain prep, etc.

 

Use a shop vac with the squeegee attachment. It's really the only way unless you have an army of towels. As far as the acid residue it's a mess, but since you neutralize the acid with baking soda prior to vacuuming it up it shouldn't ruin your vac, it just will won't look as shiny.

 

Hey, guess what. I took your advice and googled, "skim coat acid stain prep" and guess what the first hit was? This very thread! I thought that was funny.

Looks like Sherwin Williams has some good products and guides on all of this. Am I correct in understanding that a skim coat will do a few things - give me a better surface for the stain, fill in small cracks and other imperfections?

Also, thank you LukeN. I do have one of two shop vacs that I guess I could let loose on all this. Still, I'm not sure I want to dump this stuff down my drains.

 

The best thing to neutralize acid stain is to use househol cleaning ammonia.