Two days, and most of it is not what you would guess

September 2026

People picture the color going down. That is about forty minutes of a two day job. The rest is preparation, waiting on chemistry, and one genuinely strange looking hour where two guys are throwing handfuls of plastic chip into the air like they are feeding chickens.

Here is the whole thing, in order, from the homeowner’s side of the door.

The garage has to be empty. Completely. Shelving off the walls if it sits on the floor, the freezer out, the bikes gone, and the car parked somewhere else for the duration. We are grinding the whole slab including the perimeter, and anything left in the room becomes something we work around, which is how you end up with a coated floor that has an uncoated square where a cabinet was.

Color and flake blend get settled before install day. We bring samples out and look at them in your garage under your lighting, because a chip blend that looks charcoal under fluorescent shop lights can read blue in daylight through an open door. Ten or so blends run from near neutral greys through blues, greens and browns.

Day one, morning: the grinder

We start early because grinding is the loud part and neighbors are a real consideration. Diamond tooling on a planetary grinder, hooked to a vacuum, working the open floor first and then a hand grinder along the walls and into the corners where the machine cannot reach.

You will hear it inside the house. It sounds like a floor sander crossed with a shop vac, and it runs for two or three hours on a typical two car garage. The dust extraction is good but not perfect, so there will be a fine film on anything within about ten feet of the open door.

What the grinder is doing is taking the closed, troweled skin off the concrete and opening the pores so the resin has something to lock into. If there is an old coating, sealer or adhesive on the slab, this is when it comes off, and that can add hours. We cover the reasoning in more depth on the epoxy flooring page.

Day one, midday: repairs

With the slab open we can finally see it properly. Cracks get chased out slightly wider with a blade so the repair material has something to hold, then filled with a resin that cures hard and fast. Pits and small spalls get filled and sanded flush. The control joints in the slab are a decision point: some people want them filled so the floor reads as one surface, some want them honored so the slab can keep moving the way it was designed to. We will tell you what we think for your particular floor.

Then vacuuming, and more vacuuming. This is the part of the day that looks like nothing is happening and is doing more for your floor than anything else that day. Dust left in the pores is a release layer, plain and simple.

Day one, afternoon: base coat and the chip

Everything gets laid out before a single bucket is opened, because once the two parts of the base coat meet, the clock is running and it does not stop. Working time on the mixed resin is measured in minutes, not hours.

The base goes down

We start at the back wall and work toward the door, pouring ribbons and spreading with a squeegee, then backrolling to even the film. Two people, moving steadily, no stopping. A hundred percent solids product, which means nothing evaporates out of the film as it cures and the thickness we put on is the thickness that stays.

The broadcast

This is the part that looks like a bar fight in a confetti factory. While the base is still wet, we broadcast vinyl chip into it by hand, throwing upward so the flake rains down and lands flat rather than on edge. We keep going until the floor will not take any more, which the trade calls broadcasting to refusal, and at that point you are standing on what looks like a beach of plastic chips with no color visible underneath.

Then we leave. The floor sits overnight and nothing walks on it, including dogs and including you looking in with a flashlight. More on the finish itself is on the flake epoxy page.

Day two, morning: scrape and top coat

We come back to a floor covered in loose chip. All the flake that did not get wet into the base gets scraped off with a flat blade and swept up, which takes a while and produces a surprising volume of material. Underneath is the actual pattern, and this is usually the moment a homeowner walks out and says something.

Scraping also knocks down the chip edges that stand proud. The scraped surface gets vacuumed, then the polyaspartic clear goes on. It self levels around the flake, fills between the chips and gives the floor its depth and its gloss. It is UV stable, so the floor stays the color it started rather than ambering the way some clear coats do.

On a floor that needs grip, the aggregate for a non slip finish goes into this coat. Grade chosen for the room, because more grit means more traction and a harder floor to mop.

Then you wait, and this part matters

Foot traffic is usually the next day. Vehicles need longer, and the number depends on the system and the temperature during cure. A floor coated in a warm September garage cures faster than the same floor in January. We give you real numbers for your job before we leave rather than a general rule.

Driving on a floor that has not finished curing is the one mistake that undoes good work. Hot tires against a soft coating will mark it, and that mark is permanent. It is two days of patience protecting something that should last a long time.

What people ask us on install day

Finished garages, porches and shop floors are in the gallery. Every photograph there is a floor we installed.