Patio Concrete Resurfacing in Los Angeles

An outdoor slab is a harder place to put a coating than any floor inside the house, and for three reasons that have little to do with how the patio looks. It moves: concrete in direct Los Angeles sun swings a long way between two in the afternoon and four in the morning, and it grows and shrinks as it goes. It takes ultraviolet light all day, every day. And it passes moisture up from the soil beneath it, because a patio slab is rarely laid over a vapor barrier.

Those three things pick the resin for you. Epoxy is a rigid, hard-wearing floor and it is the right answer in a garage or a workshop, where the slab is shaded and its temperature barely moves. Outdoors it is the wrong one. Ultraviolet light breaks epoxy down at the surface, so it chalks and ambers, and a rigid film over a slab that expands twice a day is a film under load it was never designed to carry. Polyaspartic stays flexible enough to move with the concrete and it holds its color in direct sun. None of that makes epoxy a bad floor, and we fit a lot of it. It just means epoxy belongs indoors, under a roof, on a slab that stays at one temperature.

The second half of the answer is what happens before any resin comes out of the tub. A patio coating fails at the bond line far more often than it fails in the film, and the bond line is whatever the last owner left on the slab. Old floor paint, a sealer, a tile mortar bed, efflorescence brought up by years of watering: all of it has to come off mechanically, because a coating laid over a coating is only as stuck down as the layer underneath it. Paint is the common one. Recent work of ours on two porches in Pasadena meant stripping several layers of old floor paint off first; two coats of red polyaspartic went down after that, and the job was finished in about five hours.

Resurfacing suits most tired patios and it is the wrong purchase for a few. Here is how we tell them apart before quoting, so you are not paying us to find out.

• The slab is sound but tired: surface cracking, stains, a worn sealer, or a color you have gone off. The concrete underneath is still doing its job and only the top layer is the problem.
• You want it to stop being slippery: a flake broadcast leaves a texture underfoot, which matters most on a patio that gets hosed down or sits next to a pool. Smooth sealed concrete is at its worst wet.
• The patio is doing a job, not just sitting there: outdoor kitchens, furniture that gets dragged, planters that leak, dogs. A sealed resin surface cleans off in a way that open concrete never has.
• Tearing it out is not worth it: a patio slab in reasonable condition is expensive to break up and cart away, and the replacement takes weeks to cure before anything can go on it. Coating the one you have avoids both.
• The slab is broken rather than worn: cracks wider than a coin, sections at different heights, or a corner that has settled. A coating follows the slab it is laid on, so a moving crack reappears through the finish within a season. That is concrete work first, and sometimes concrete replacement.
• It is not a poured slab at all: pavers, flagstone, brick or tile set in mortar. There is no continuous surface for a resin to bond across, and the joints move independently of each other. We will tell you that on the phone rather than at the quote.

If your patio is in the first group, the next step is a visit. We come out, read the slab, measure it, and put the patio concrete resurfacing in writing with the prep it actually needs itemized rather than assumed. If it is in the second group we will say so, and you will not get a quote for work that was never going to hold. Either way the visit costs nothing.