One even color
over a ground slab
for the Madison garage
A two part resin keyed into concrete we have opened with diamond tooling, laid in a single color from the back wall to the door.
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A young slab still gets ground
Most of the garages we coat in Madison are large two and three car rooms on slabs poured in the last thirty years. Owners tend to assume concrete that young can take a coating as it is. It cannot. The finisher closes the surface tight with a trowel when the slab is poured, and a new slab often has a cure and seal sprayed on as well. Resin laid on either one has nothing to grip, and sooner or later it lets go.
So the grinder comes first on every job. Diamond tooling opens the pores so the epoxy has something to key into, and it strips any sealer on the way. It also shows us what the surface was hiding. Oil that has soaked below the top gets a degreaser and a second look before any base coat goes near it.
What a car does to a garage floor
A car brings heat and weight in with it, plus whatever drips off the engine. Tires fresh off a summer drive are hot enough to pull at a coating that is soft or poorly bonded, which is where hot tire pickup comes from. Epoxy that is properly bonded to a ground slab shrugs off oil and brake fluid and wipes clean with a rag.
The one thing we ask is that the car stays out until the coating has cured. A tire on a soft floor leaves a mark that never comes back out.
What one color shows
Solid color has a clean, finished look that plenty of people want, and it asks more of you in upkeep. A plain gray floor puts every footprint, tire track and bit of drywall dust on display. Flake buries those in its pattern. Solid color leaves them out where you can see them.
Light gray, like the floor at the top of this page, bounces the ceiling light back around the room, which helps in a garage with one fixture and no window.
A solid floor is honest about how clean the garage really is.
- Good in a shop. If the garage doubles as a workshop, a plain floor makes it easy to find what rolled off the bench.
- Good for a tidy owner. A floor that gets swept every week anyway keeps the clean look with little extra effort.
- Harder with daily parking. Two cars in and out every day will show their tracks on a solid color between sweeps.
- Harder on a patchy slab. Small dips and old repairs show through one color more than they do under chip.
If you end up on the flake side, the same base coat carries the chip. The flake floor page for Madison covers that system and how the broadcast works.
Back rooms and utility halls
Madison’s working buildings are the other half of this page. A town whose commuter base heads out to Research Park and Redstone, with retail running along County Line Road, has a lot of back of house space: utility corridors, stock rooms, mechanical rooms, the hall behind the sales floor that nobody photographs. Those floors take carts, mop buckets and the occasional leak, and they rarely get much attention.
It is the same resin we put down in a garage. What changes is the edge. In a room that gets mopped hard, we turn the coating up the wall as a cove base, so water and cleaner find no seam at the floor line to slip under. The photo shows that kind of job: a gray broadcast floor carried up the wall in a corridor full of plumbing stubs and pipe.
Most of these rooms are never seen by a customer, so color rarely comes up. What people ask for is a floor that mops clean and stops the bare concrete from dusting onto the shelving.
Where a drain sits in the floor, the coating turns down into it and stops inside, so no lip is left for water to work behind. A room that sees boiling water, steam and harsh wash down every night needs something tougher than epoxy, and we will tell you so. Building managers can send us the room details along with a window when it can be closed.
Getting the edges right
A floor looks finished or rough at its edges. Before anything starts, we walk the garage with you and settle where the coating stops at the door opening and how it meets each wall, then we cut it in carefully along every one.
That is the reason we ask for an empty room. Shelving feet, storage bins, a workbench and anything mounted low on the wall all make the line harder to cut clean. One or two heavy pieces can usually stay and be worked around, but the more open slab we have, the better the edge.
The install goes on the calendar as a run of days in a row, and you get the dates once you accept the quote. A resin floor cannot be stopped halfway and left overnight, so yours does not get squeezed in between other jobs.
When the garage is ready to talk about, tell us about it or call (205) 238-8111. The full system, coat by coat, is on the epoxy flooring page. More finished floors are in the gallery, and the Madison overview covers the rest of our work in town.
What Madison garage owners ask about solid color
Building managers here ask a few of these too.
Can epoxy go over the paint already on my garage floor?
No. Paint holds on to concrete only as well as it happens to, and anything laid over it can only hold as well as the paint. We grind the paint off with any sealer under it, so the base coat bonds to clean, open concrete. That step is what keeps a floor from peeling.
Is a solid color floor slick when it gets wet?
A smooth gloss coat can be, which is why grit can be worked into the top coat. The grade is a trade: more grit gives more traction and makes the floor harder to mop. We set it by how the room gets cleaned and how much water comes in on a car.
Can you coat just one bay of a three car garage?
We can, though a line will show where that section stops, and a floor done in one go looks better for it. In most houses it is easier to clear the whole garage and park in the driveway for the days we are there, so the floor comes out as one piece.
Can a back room be done while the rest of the building stays open?
Often, yes. We treat the room as its own job and book the days in a row. Other rooms can usually carry on. The room itself is out of use until the coating cures, and you get that window from us before we start, so stock and staff can be planned around it.
Will a solid gray floor yellow in a garage with windows?
Plain epoxy is not UV stable, so a garage with a window, or a door left open on sunny days, can amber over time. Our systems finish with a polyaspartic clear coat, which keeps its color in the light. On a solid gray that matters more, because any yellowing shows right away.
How is your epoxy different from a kit from the hardware store?
Mostly the prep. Store kits lean on an acid etch, and an etch will not take off a sealer or open the slab the way diamonds do. We grind, so the resin bonds into open concrete. The base coat is a hundred percent solids, so no solvent leaves the film as it cures.
The other Madison systems
Solid color or flake for your garage?
Describe the room and how it gets used, and we will tell you which one fits before anyone starts a grinder.