Epoxy floor removal cost

What a failing coating looks like

A coating that is losing its grip usually tells you where. It peels in the tire paths first, because that is where hot tires pull on it every day. It lifts at the edges and along the garage door, where water and grit get under it. It bubbles or blisters in patches, which can mean moisture pushing up from under the slab. And sometimes the clear top coat sheets off in pieces while the flake stays down, which means the two coats never bonded to each other.

Some changes are not a bond failure at all. Straight epoxy ambers and chalks in sunlight, so a floor that has gone yellow in the strip the sun reaches, or turned powdery on top, has a top coat problem rather than a grip problem. It can still look bad enough that you want it gone, and it comes off the same way.

What caused it is usually one of a short list. The coat went on thin, the slab was etched or scrubbed rather than ground, the coating went over oil or an old sealer, or the top coat went on before the base coat had set up. In an Arizona garage, heat finds the weak spot faster: a slab that bakes all afternoon and a car that parks on the same two strips of it every evening. What went wrong with your floor in particular is something Jayson looks at on the slab, at the quote visit, and not something we guess at from here.

How to remove epoxy from a garage floor

You grind it off. Chemical strippers and scrapers can lift thin paint, but an epoxy that is still bonded in places holds on too well for either, and the part still holding has to come off with the part that let go. A diamond grinder takes the coating down to the concrete underneath.

• We grind every bit of the old coating off, the parts still stuck as well as the parts peeling, so the new base coat bonds to concrete and not to a coating that has already failed somewhere.
• We vacuum up the dust and the ground-off coating, so what is left is clean, open concrete.
• We look at the slab once it is bare, since an old coating can hide cracks and stained concrete under it.
• We fill cracks before the new floor goes down, priced as an add-on on your quote.
• Where the stem walls along the bottom of the garage walls are chipped or crumbling, we re-sack them, so the new coating finishes against a sound edge.

From there the new floor goes down the way every floor we do goes down: an epoxy base coat with flake broadcast into it, a 24 hour hold while the base coat sets up hard, and a polyaspartic clear top coat. That hold is why the new floor is a two day install. The whole system, and what each coat is for, is our garage floor coating.

Why a new coat over an old one fails

A coating is only as good as what it is stuck to. Lay a new coat over a failing one and the new coat bonds to the old coating, and the old coating is the part that already let go of the concrete. The new floor lifts wherever the old one does, and it takes the new coat with it. Even where the old coating still looks stuck, it is a smooth, sealed surface that a new base coat has little to grip, and the grinder cannot open the concrete through it.

That is the same reason we grind every slab, coated or not. Grinding opens the top of the concrete, so the base coat keys into it rather than sitting on it. On a floor that has been coated before, grinding the old coating off and opening the concrete are one job.

What it costs and what to expect

Removal is $2 per square foot. The new floor that goes down after it is priced by the square foot too, and so are crack filling and stem wall repair, all on the same quote. Jayson comes out, measures the slab, looks at the old coating and gives you the price in person, and you pick your blend and book the install date at the same visit. If you would rather spread the cost, financing is available through Affirm.

Grinding a coating off is loud and makes dust, and the vacuum is what keeps the dust down. The garage is out of use while we work, so the cars live in the driveway or on the street. Jayson is on every job, and the installers who start your floor are the ones who finish it. What we put in writing about the new floor is the written warranty, and a driveway or patio done at the same time goes on the same quote, like everything else we do.