The floor itself is four steps and none of them takes long. The slab is opened with a diamond grinder until the closed surface the builder left has gone and there is a key for the epoxy to hold on to. An epoxy or polyaspartic base is rolled out after that, flake is broadcast into it by hand while it is still soft, and a clear polyaspartic seal goes over everything once the loose chip has been scraped away. All four steps ask the same thing of you, which is concrete they can be put on. A step that has to stop at an obstacle and pick up again past it is where a floor stops being one floor.
Which of those items can move is settled by plumbing and fixings rather than by preference, and it is worth going through them one at a time. A water heater is plumbed, vented and usually strapped to the wall, so shifting it is another trade's morning and another trade's invoice, and most people leave it standing. A washer and dryer roll out in ten minutes and come back the same evening. A rack bolted down is the awkward middle case, because pulling it out leaves anchor holes in the concrete, and holes have to be filled and made sound before epoxy goes anywhere near them. Where what is under a fixing turns out to be worse than a patch, movement is corrected on its own ticket, and we say so at the visit rather than afterwards.
Whatever stays put leaves a line behind it. The epoxy runs up to the footprint of the water heater platform and stops there, and once the bay is back together that line sits at the edge of the new floor for as long as the floor lasts. One of the three builds makes almost nothing of it, one is neutral about it, and one frames it. Which of them you pick settles that, and the chips and colors are worth looking at properly before you commit to one.
Flake is chips broadcast into the epoxy while it is soft and locked down afterwards by a polyaspartic seal. It is what we fit in most bays here, and where something is staying put it has an advantage the other two do not: the surface is already broken up, so a hand cut edge against a platform or a pedestal reads as part of the pattern instead of as a join. It absorbs the grit a garage takes in, for the same reason. Inside the house the argument for it changes completely, because there the pattern is being asked to do something else entirely.
A single even tone of epoxy under the same polyaspartic seal is the calmest of the three to look at and the one that shows a boundary most plainly. An unbroken color has nothing going on inside it, so the eye travels straight to whatever interrupts it: the cut around a platform, the strip of older concrete that was under a bench, the made good patch where a bolt used to sit. In a bay being cleared to the walls that is no drawback whatever, and it is the cleanest of the three. In a bay where three things are staying exactly where they are, it is the finish that will keep pointing at them.
Metallic is the one epoxy build where the look is made after the resin is on the ground. Pigment is carried through the epoxy and then moved about while the floor is still wet, and that movement is where the depth comes from rather than a single even shade. It is the dearest of the three and the least willing to be interrupted, because the working is done by hand across the whole floor and every fixed object is somewhere the hand has to stop and start again. A bay cleared to the walls will take it well. A bay with a water heater in the corner is asking a great deal of it.
Three things move the number, and the first of them is the list we made at the start. What is going and what is staying, what is already on the concrete, and which of the systems ends up going over it.
Hardly any of these slabs are bare. There is normally a sealer nobody remembers being applied, or floor paint from one energetic weekend. Worn but still gripping the concrete is the cheap case, because it is cut back until there is a key and the new epoxy goes over what is left of it. Peeling or blistering is the dear one, since all of it has to come off before a single coat can start. Either way, our rate for a garage bay is the same in every city we work in, and neither the visit nor the quote is charged for.
An epoxy body with a polyaspartic seal on top is the usual answer and the better value in most bays. Going polyaspartic from the base coat upward costs more, and it hardens far faster and puts the bay back in use sooner, which counts for a lot when everything that came out of the garage is currently standing in the driveway. That is the trade in one line: the cheaper system asks for more of your week, and the dearer one gives most of the week back.
Two things can come out of a survey that change the job rather than the price of it, and both are better known on the day. Concrete that has dropped or cracked right across its width has moved, and moved concrete is dealt with before any epoxy or polyaspartic is allowed near it. Damp traveling up through a slab will push a coating off from below however much is spent on the coating, so it is tested for instead of assumed. There is also a third answer for the case where the budget will not stretch to a system at all, which is the concrete taken back and finished as itself, with nothing laid over it.
Once the list is settled and the slab has been read, what is left is arithmetic. A garage floor in Ventura lands between $5 and $7 per square foot in epoxy or polyaspartic, and a standard two car bay is normally finished inside a working day. Our reviews stand at 5.0 from more than 120 of them, and we are usually booking a couple of weeks ahead. Call (818) 359-3932 and tell us what is standing on that floor at the moment, and which of it you would rather not have to move.
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