The questions people actually ask

Not if the slab is prepped and the weather is right. Bubbles come from one of two places: moisture vapor pushing up through the concrete with nothing to stop it, or the slab warming up while the coating is still wet so trapped air expands out through the film. The first is solved by a real moisture vapor barrier in the base coat. The second is solved by watching the slab temperature and the dew point and not coating on a rising-temperature afternoon. We check both before we book the date, not after.

Inside a closed garage, light rain is usually not a problem. Outdoor concrete is different. Rain on an uncured top coat leaves a permanently dulled, cloudy or pocked finish, and patching it later almost never matches. If the forecast turns on an outdoor patio, porch or apron, we move the date. Moving a date costs you a week. Coating and hoping costs you the floor.

No, and anyone who says yes is setting you up to be unhappy. A coating is about a quarter the thickness of a credit card. It follows whatever shape your slab already has. If your floor has a dip by the drain or a high spot where it was floated heavy, you will still have that dip and that high spot, and a gloss finish will actually make them easier to see because light reflects off the contour. We can patch and feather problem areas, and on a bad slab we can quote a cementitious level coat as a separate step. What we will not do is let you find out afterward.

Diamond grinding makes a lot of dust. We run vacuums on the grinder and they capture most of it, but not all of it, and there is no such thing as a dustless grind. Fine concrete dust will settle on anything left in the garage and will drift toward a door left open to the house. Before we start we tape the house door, cover what cannot be moved, and tell you plainly to clear shelves and benches. Then we vacuum and wipe the space down before we leave.

They can if nobody plans for it. Flake is broadcast by hand and it goes everywhere inside the work area, including window sills, wall bases and the first few feet of any adjoining carpet. We mask the walls, the door threshold and any finished surface in the room, and the final step of the job is vacuuming and a wipe-down, not just sweeping the middle of the floor. If we track something into the house, we clean it.

Resin, grind slurry and flake all stain concrete permanently if they sit. Our grinder, buckets and mixing station go on tarps, never straight on your driveway, and we stage the trailer off the concrete when we can. If something does get on the drive we deal with it that day while it is still removable, not after it cures.

There is a solvent smell during the base coat and the top coat, strongest for the first couple of hours after each goes down. In an attached garage that smell can reach the house through the door and through a shared wall. We seal the door, we keep the overhead door open, and we run air movement. Most families stay home with no issue. If anyone in the house is pregnant, has asthma or is sensitive to fumes, plan to be out for the day and we will tell you when it is clear. Basement jobs need more planning because there is no overhead door, so we talk that through at the estimate.

Ours is a written 10-year workmanship warranty: adhesion, peeling, delamination, bubbling and flaking caused by how we installed the floor. What no coating warranty in this industry covers is the concrete itself. If the slab settles, heaves or cracks because the ground under it moved, the coating will crack with it, and that is a concrete problem, not a coating problem. Moisture pushing up from a slab with no vapor break under it is the same story. We would rather hand you that list at the estimate than quote it back to you from the fine print after something goes wrong.

The apron is the strip outside the overhead door, and it lives a completely different life than the rest of your floor. It gets direct sun and UV, it freezes and thaws all winter, it takes the full load of a plow blade or a shovel edge, and it catches every bit of road salt that drips off the car. On top of that, the apron is often a separate pour from the garage slab with a joint between them that moves. It is the first thing to show wear on almost every coated garage. We grind it the same as the rest, we treat the joint as a joint instead of coating over it, and we tell you honestly that the apron is the hardest-working square footage you own.

Your written quote is the price. The only thing that changes it is something we could not see at the walkthrough, like a failed coating under carpet glue or moisture readings that call for a heavier build, and in that case you get a revised number and a decision before anyone starts working. Your date is a real date on our schedule. If weather forces a move on an outdoor job we call you, explain why, and reschedule. You will not find out by us not showing up.

Stay off it for 24 hours. Keep vehicles off for 72 hours. Those are the numbers for a normal install at normal temperatures. Cold slows the cure down and we will give you the exact times for your floor before we leave. Parking a hot car on a coating that has not fully cured is one of the most common ways a good floor gets ruined in week one.

Not the way that phrase is sold. We are usually on site for one day, and most residential floors are a single visit. But the floor is not finished when we pull out, it is curing. The companies advertising a floor you can park on that night get there by skipping the moisture vapor barrier and rolling polyaspartic straight onto the slab. That is the floor that lifts in two to four summers. We install the full build and the trade-off is cure time, not quality.