Garage Flooring in Pasadena, CA

When a garage coating peels, the coating usually gets the blame. More often the concrete under it is wet. Ground water moves up through a slab as vapor, and in a house built before a plastic sheet under the concrete was routine there is nothing in the way of it. The vapor reaches the underside of a sealed surface, finds it closed, and lifts it away from the slab in discs and blisters. No top coat prevents that, which is why a floor can be ground back, primed and laid properly and still come away in its second year. The slab is the thing to settle, and it can be settled before anything is mixed.

Reading the concrete for moisture is a short job and it belongs at the start rather than after a system has been chosen. Where the slab comes back dry the floor is built straight onto it. Where it comes back wet, a moisture vapor barrier goes down first, a coat whose only purpose is to hold the vapor below it so that what goes on top can grip the slab and stay gripped to it. Adding one later is not a small correction, because the floor already down has to come off to reach the concrete underneath it. That is the whole argument for asking the question early. Where the slab has dropped as well as worn, that is a floor that is out of level rather than just worn out, and it is put right before any resin goes near it.

Grinding is how a slab gets opened up and how it gets read at the same time. A diamond grinder run with a vacuum takes the surface back to clean concrete and pulls the dust out as it goes, so the floor ends up bare without the rest of the house wearing it. What comes up sets the rest of the work: oil that soaked in years ago sits deeper than it looks and has to be drawn out before a primer will hold onto anything. What goes over the slab once it is sound follows the same order in every garage we coat. Where the concrete turns out to be out of level rather than simply worn out, coating it locks the fall in instead of taking it out. Cracks are cut out and filled before anything else, and the control joints are left as joints, because filling one rigid only sends the crack somewhere nobody chose.

With the slab sound the garage floor gets built in three passes. A pigmented base coat goes into the open concrete, the flake is thrown across it while that coat is still wet so the chips key in rather than sit on top, and a clear seal coat goes over everything and takes the wear from then on. Flake is what most garages here end up with, because the chip breaks up the surface and a working floor stops showing every mark. A solid color is the cleaner look and asks more of you. Metallic suits a garage you spend time in rather than one you park two cars in. Polyaspartic in place of epoxy is what lets the whole build go down and cure inside a day, and it holds its color where an epoxy top coat slowly ambers. The rest of what we coat in Pasadena houses is prepared the same way, whether it is a garage or the room next to it.

A garage floor has one edge that is not really indoors. The slab runs out to the door line, and the sun reaches the last few feet of it for part of every day, which is where an epoxy top coat gives up its color first and starts to yellow against the rest of the floor. The flake decides how much the floor shows, and the color is worth settling before we arrive rather than on the day. The system that survives a door left open all afternoon is the answer at that edge, and because it is the same resin family it goes over the same build without a join. The blends you can actually pick from are laid out to look at.

What moves the number on a garage is a short list and most of it is decided on the concrete: how big the floor is, what the grinder finds once the surface is off, whether the slab asks for a moisture barrier, and which system goes over the top. Most garages are finished inside a working day. The sequence after that is set by the resin rather than by us, so you get the floor back for footfall first and for the car a while later, and rushing either end of that is how a new floor picks up its first mark. Tell us the size of the garage and roughly how old the house is, and we can put a number on a Pasadena garage floor from there and confirm it on the concrete.