Los Angeles Outdoor Concrete Coatings

Walk the outside of the house and you will see four different jobs. The driveway takes the car. The path along the side takes feet, a hose and whatever the planting drops on it. The steps take the full weight of everyone who uses the front door. The pool deck spends half the year wet. The same flake polyaspartic suits all four, and what changes between them is the weight of the build and the depth of the chip.

What the coating does is the same everywhere on the run. It closes the surface so water sits on top instead of soaking in, it takes a hosing and a stiff brush, and the chip bed hides the marks that bare concrete shows for years. Leaf stain and rust rings come off it. Washing is the whole of the maintenance and there is no yearly reseal to book. The one thing worth settling early is where the coating stops, because a coated surface and a bare one sit at different colors from that day on. Pasadena and Glendale have outdoor pages of their own, and the rest of the county is covered from our service areas.

Send us a photograph of the concrete and we will tell you what it would take and what it would look like.

A driveway is the only part of the run that something drives onto, and that changes what has to go down. A car parks in the same two strips every day, so the wear arrives in bands instead of spreading itself across the slab. It carries in road dirt and it drips. A thin finish gives out there first, which is why a driveway gets the heaviest build on the run and the densest bed of chip to hide what it collects.

The build is a pigmented polyaspartic base, colored chip thrown into it while it is still wet, and a clear polyaspartic coat locking the chip in. The chip is what you actually see: a dense speckled floor that reads as a finished surface, not as painted concrete, in a color picked against the house instead of off a screen. It keeps that color in full sun, which is why the build out here is polyaspartic and not epoxy. Inside the garage door the same materials do a different job, and a garage floor gets quoted as its own piece of work.

A pool deck is the one surface in the run that is wet on purpose. Everything else outside gets wet when it rains and dries out again afterwards. A deck is wet in the afternoon, wet again the next afternoon, and crossed barefoot in between. That single fact decides more about the coating than the color does, and it is the reason we will not quote a deck off a photograph the way we sometimes will a driveway.

So on a deck the chip earns its place twice over. Thrown into the wet polyaspartic until the surface will not take any more, it leaves a texture with a tooth to it that holds a wet foot, and it breaks up the glare a smooth sealed deck throws back at you all summer. Sun cream, barbecue grease and the black marks that collect around a drain all lift with a hose. The deck stops being the thing you scrub before people come over.

A flight is where the run changes level, and it is the part people notice most, because you look straight down at it on the way out of the house. The chip gives a wet tread something to hold and the color breaks the flight up so the edge of each step reads clearly. Every flight also has a top and a bottom that join something else, and those joins are where an outdoor job usually goes wrong: the coating arrives at the landing, stops on a line, and leaves the walkway or the porch it meets in a different condition. Steps and porches are the commonest of this work, and how outdoor concrete is priced and coated in Pasadena follows the same order as it does anywhere else in the county. On a hillside lot most of that concrete is steps, and what an outdoor coating has to do in Glendale starts at the front edge of them.

The coating wraps the front edge of a tread instead of stopping short of it, which is the part of a step that goes first when it has been painted. Old paint has to be ground off before any of that goes on, and the concrete gets checked for cracks that still move through the seasons. Steps take longer than their square footage suggests, and they repay it: a coated flight is the difference between an entrance that looks kept and one that looks tired.

A flight and the walkway it lands on get coated in one visit, and they cost less that way than they do apart.

The walkway is the surface people leave off the list, and it is the one that makes the rest look finished. It touches everything else: the driveway at one end, the steps at the other, and the side path nobody thinks about until the trash goes down it. A path is quick work next to a driveway, it takes the same base, chip and clear coat, and it is walkable again by the afternoon. Where the patio is the whole project rather than one part of the exterior, patio concrete resurfacing goes into more detail.

Coated, a path stops soaking up what lands on it. Rain runs off, leaf stain and rust rings lift with a hose, and the green that darkens a shaded path through winter has nothing left to root into. Washing is the whole of the maintenance and there is no yearly reseal to book. If the budget only stretches to part of the run this year we will say so and price it that way, and we will show you where the edge is going to fall before anything goes down. Our flooring work in Pasadena recently included two porches stripped of old floor paint and recoated in red polyaspartic, finished in about five hours.

Call us, and we will come out, read the concrete and price the flake polyaspartic for as much of the run as you want done.