Interior concrete floor coating

What a floor inside the house goes through

A floor in a living space does not bake the way a garage floor does, but it wears in its own ways. Desert grit comes in on shoes and paws and works like sandpaper in the paths people walk every day. Chair legs scrape the same spots at the table, and a dog’s claws scratch where it turns at the back door.

Sun through a west facing slider lands on the same strip of floor every afternoon, and straight epoxy ambers and chalks in sunlight. That is why the clear coat over the color is polyaspartic, which is UV stable and holds its color, rather than more epoxy.

What is already on the slab matters as much as what the room will see. Carpet glue, the thinset left behind by tile, paint, and old sealers all leave something between the concrete and anything laid over it. A coating grips whatever it sits on, so a coating over glue is only as stuck as the glue is. The base coat has to land on bare, ground concrete, which means all of it comes off first. What has to come up, and how, gets settled at the quote visit, once Jayson has seen what is on your slab.

A ground floor slab also sits on soil, and moisture moves up through concrete from underneath. Carpet lets that moisture pass without showing it. A coating seals the top of the slab, so moisture coming up pushes against the coating instead, and that shows as blisters and patches that lift.

How we coat an interior floor

The work is the same system we put in a garage. What differs is the edge, since the floor runs into walls, cabinets and doorways instead of a garage door.

• We grind the whole slab with a diamond grinder and vacuum it, so the base coat lands on open concrete and not on glue, paint or dust.
• We fill cracks before anything goes down, priced as an add-on on your quote. A solid color or a metallic finish has no flake to hide a crack, so an open crack shows through.
• We cut the coating in along the walls and at each doorway, where the floor stops and the next room starts.
• We lay the epoxy base coat in your color. For a metallic floor, the metallic is moved through the wet epoxy by hand, which is where its swirls come from, and it brings in a second installer.
• We leave the floor to hold for 24 hours. The base coat has to set up hard before anything goes over it, or the top coat traps what is still curing underneath.
• We come back and roll on the polyaspartic clear coat, which is the layer that takes the foot traffic and the sun from the windows.

This work stays on the ground floor because of the grinder: it does not go up a staircase. The hold is why an interior floor is a two day install, the same as a garage.

Pure epoxy or metallic in a room you live in

There is one system, and what changes from one floor to the next is the finish. For a room you live in, two of them suit it. Pure epoxy with no flake is one solid color from wall to wall, and it reads as a finished floor under a rug and furniture. Metallic has movement in it, like poured stone or marble, and no two metallic floors come out the same, because the pattern is made by hand while the epoxy is wet. Metallic and marble finishes cost more than the others, because they bring in a second installer.

The two flake finishes still suit some rooms. A full flake broadcast or a light broadcast gives the floor texture underfoot and hides small marks, which fits a mudroom, a home gym, or the room between the garage and the kitchen. If the room is a workshop rather than a living space, read about shop floor coating, where full flake is the finish we point people to. Look at the metallic and flake colors before the quote visit, and picture them in the light of the room they are going in.

What it costs and what to expect

We price by the square foot, always. A bigger room costs more, and so do crack filling, a metallic or marble finish, or an old coating that has to be ground off before the new one goes down. Jayson comes out, measures the rooms and gives you the price in person, and you pick your color and book the install date at the same visit. That is also when he sees the edges, the doorways and whatever is still on the slab. Financing is available through Affirm if you would rather spread the cost.

For two days the room is out of use, and so is any path through it, so plan how the house gets from one end to the other. Jayson is on every job, and the installers who start your floor are the ones who finish it. Both coats smell while they cure, so open the windows and run a fan pulling air out of the room, and keep kids and pets out until the floor takes feet.

What we put in writing about the floor is the written warranty, in its own words. A garage or patio done at the same time goes on the same quote, priced by its own footage, like everything else we do.