The Garage Floor Standard

A coated garage floor fails from the bottom, not the top. When you see a floor peeling up in sheets two summers in, it is almost never the topcoat that failed — it is the preparation underneath it. So this standard spends as much ink on what happens before the first coating as on the coatings themselves. It is one system, installed the same way on every floor: two tests, a grind, the repairs, three layers, and a clock. There is no good-better-best menu here, for the same reason there is only one paint on the other side of this book — we install the system we believe in, and we put every step of it in writing.

First, the Garage Goes Empty

We coat your floor wall to wall, so the garage has to be empty — and emptying it is yours to do. Boxes, bins, shelves, the car: out before we arrive. When it all comes back is not a guess — it is a printed schedule, the cure clock at the end of this standard.

The water softener is the one exception, and we handle it differently on purpose. If a softener lives in your garage, we never move it ourselves — water systems are their own trade, and practicing someone else's trade on your house is not something we do. Complete Water Systems LLC handles the softener for $150, paid directly to them. We would rather hand you the right company than improvise with your plumbing.

The Moisture Test — Every Floor, Before Everything

Concrete looks dry and often isn't. Ground moisture moves up through a slab, and a coating installed over that moisture can be pushed loose from below no matter how well it was applied. So on the day work begins — before the grinder is even unloaded — we test your slab's surface moisture. The line is 4%. At or under it, we proceed. Over it, everything stops — before any grinding — and we talk through the options: sometimes a vapor-barrier system at added scope, and sometimes our honest recommendation not to coat the floor at all. What we will never do is quietly coat a slab that failed its moisture test. The warranty chapter tells the rest of that story, including the part you would get from us in writing.

The Hardness Test — So We Grind It Right

No two slabs are poured, cured, or finished alike, and hard concrete and soft concrete do not grind the same. On every job we test the slab's hardness on the Mohs scale and record the result. The hardness reading never decides whether your floor gets coated — it decides how we grind it: which diamond tooling your particular slab needs to open up correctly. A soft slab and a hard slab both get coated. They just get ground differently, and we test instead of guessing.

Diamond Grinding — Never Acid Etching

There are two ways to prepare concrete for a coating. The shortcut is acid etching: wash the slab with acid, rinse it off, and hope it opened the surface evenly. The standard is diamond grinding: machines physically abrade the slab, uniformly, leaving fresh concrete with a mechanical profile the coating can lock into. We diamond-grind every floor, and we never acid-etch. You can check this one from your own driveway — on grind day you will see machines and dust extraction, not a bucket and a hose.

The Repairs — After the Grind, on Purpose

Grinding does one more thing for your floor: it shows us the slab as it really is. Cracks, voids, and joints hide under old sealers and surface paste until the grind exposes them — which is why our repairs happen after grinding, never before. Filling first means repairing blind. Every crack, void, and joint that calls for it is filled with ResinTek RT-CR, a semi-rigid polyurea made for concrete repair. Semi-rigid is the point: a filler that flexes with the slab instead of fighting it.

Layer One — The Epoxy Base

The base coat is ResinTek RTE-100, a 100% solids, heavily pigmented epoxy, applied at roughly 10 mils and run with an accelerant additive. "100% solids" is worth translating: there is no solvent in it waiting to evaporate, so the thickness we put down is the thickness that stays. Epoxy's talent is the bond — it grips ground concrete tenaciously, which is exactly the job of a base coat. And in our system, the base coat is the only place epoxy is ever used.

The Chips — Broadcast to Full Rejection

Into that wet base go the chips — a Torginol quarter-inch vinyl chip blend, in the pattern you chose. The standard is called full rejection, and it means what it sounds like: we keep broadcasting chips until the wet epoxy cannot accept one more — roughly a pound of chip for every eight square feet of floor. Not "scattered until it looks covered." Loaded until the floor refuses. And because the base runs accelerated, the floor is ready for the next step about 90 minutes after broadcast: the excess chip is scraped away, leaving a uniformly, fully loaded surface — there is no overnight wait built into this system.

Layer Two — The Polyaspartic Top

The wear surface — the layer that takes tires, sun, oil, and dropped tools — is ResinTek Polyaspartic 85, a low-VOC polyaspartic clear coat, applied at roughly 12 mils. Low-VOC is the honest label, and we use it on purpose: polyaspartic chemistry cannot be made zero-VOC, and we would rather tell you that plainly than round it down.

The layer law. In our system, epoxy is only ever the base, and polyaspartic is only ever the top — every floor, that order, no exceptions. Plenty of companies now run fast-set material top to bottom, usually because it is faster, not because it is better. We think your floor deserves the better bond: epoxy grips the concrete, polyaspartic takes the wear — each chemistry doing the one job it does best.

The Cure Clock — 8 · 24 · 48

The system cures fast, and the schedule is printed, not guessed. The clock starts the moment your clear coat is finished:

The same clock is printed on the care card that goes into your hand at completion, so nobody has to remember it.

Your Color

Three ways to land on the right chip blend: samples your crew brings, our online color chart, and a sample board when you want to see a blend at full size. Pick whichever way suits you — this is the fun part, and we are never the reason to rush it.

A floor is a system: two tests, a grind, the repairs, three layers, and a clock — every step checkable while it happens, and every number in writing before we start.