Every coating company in this market advertises a dustless grind. There is no such thing. There is well-controlled dust and badly-controlled dust, and the difference is whether anyone covered your things before the grinder started.
Diamond grinding removes the top layer of your slab, and that material has to go somewhere. A grinder with a shroud and a dust extractor captures the large majority of it at the head. The rest is the fine fraction, and fine concrete dust hangs in the air for a long time and settles on every horizontal surface in the room.
What that means practically: anything left on a shelf, a workbench, a chest freezer or the top of a water heater will have a grey film on it. Anything on a wall hook will have it. If the door to the house is not sealed, some of it goes into the house and lands on the laundry room floor first.
We tell people to clear the garage completely, including shelves and benches, not just the floor. A crew that only tells you to move the cars is setting you up to spend your evening cleaning.
Flake is broadcast by hand into a wet base coat, thrown up and out so it lands evenly. It goes to the wall bases, into window sills, onto the garage door panels, into the door track, and a few feet onto any carpet that meets the work area. On a basement job it will find the stairs.
Loose flake sweeps and vacuums up easily if somebody actually does it. The failure mode is a crew that cleans the field of the floor, loads the trailer and leaves, and a homeowner who finds chips on the window ledge and in the carpet for the next month.
Resin, grinding slurry and flake all permanently stain bare concrete if they sit on it. That makes your driveway a real risk, and it is a complaint people make about coating crews. Buckets, mixing stations and the grinder belong on tarps. Trailers stage off the concrete where there is room. If something does get on the drive it gets dealt with that day while it can still come up, not discovered after it cured.
There is a solvent smell during the base coat and again during the top coat, strongest for the first couple of hours after each. In an attached garage it can reach the house through the door and through the shared wall. With the overhead door open and air moving, most families stay home without any trouble.
If someone in the house is pregnant, has asthma or is generally sensitive, plan to be out for the day. A basement job needs more thought, because there is no overhead door and the air has to be moved mechanically. We talk that through at the estimate rather than on the morning of.
That last one matters most. Problems that get found while a crew is still standing in your garage get fixed in ten minutes. The same problem found the next morning becomes a phone call.
Yes, including shelves and benches. The floor has to be clear to work on and everything else has to be clear of dust. If the space is packed and moving it is a problem, tell us at the quote and we will work out the haul-off with you.
Not if the door to the house is properly sealed and the overhead door is open with air moving outward. A taped threshold is a two-minute step that prevents the single most common complaint about this work.
Strongest for a couple of hours after each coat, noticeably reduced by the next morning, and gone within a few days. Keeping the garage ventilated for the first 24 hours speeds it up considerably.
Tell us the room, the rough size and your town. You get a written price, not a two-hour pitch. Fastest way is to text a photo of the floor to (815) 585-1750.
