Two garage floors can look identical on the day the crew drives away and be completely different floors. One was ground open with diamond tooling, tested for moisture, repaired with a compatible product and finished with a UV stable top coat. The other was acid etched on a Saturday morning and rolled out of a kit. You cannot tell them apart in a photograph. You can tell them apart in about eighteen months.
So the questions below are not about price. They are about the parts of the job that get covered up. Some of them make us look good, which we will admit up front. Some of them are just fair, and we would rather you ask everybody the same ones.
1. How are you preparing the slab?
This is the question. If the answer is diamond grinding or shot blasting, good. If it is acid etching, a pressure wash, or a deglosser, ask why. Acid roughens the very top of the concrete without opening the pore structure evenly, leaves salts that have to be neutralised and rinsed perfectly, and does nothing whatever about an existing sealer. A large share of the failed floors we get called out to look at were etched rather than ground.
2. What happens if you find moisture?
A slab on grade can pass water vapour upward for its entire life. Seal that escape route with a coating and pressure builds underneath until the film lifts off in sheets, with nothing wrong with the workmanship above it. An installer who has not thought about this is an installer who will coat over it. The answer you want involves testing before committing, and a willingness to say the slab is not ready.
3. Who is actually doing the work?
Plenty of outfits sell the job and subcontract the floor. That is where a quote and a result stop being related, because the person who promised you something is not there when the decisions get made about prep. Ask whether the crew is in house and whether the person quoting will be on site.
4. What is the top coat, and is it UV stable?
Ordinary epoxy ambers in sunlight. In a garage with a window, a covered porch or anything outdoors, a floor finished in epoxy alone will go yellow, usually by the second summer. A polyaspartic or other UV stable top coat holds its colour. If the answer is vague, or the top coat is described only as “a clear”, press for the product.
5. How thick is the system, and how many coats?
“One day epoxy” usually means one thin coat rolled over minimal prep. There is a real difference between a hundred percent solids base with a broadcast and a clear over it, and a single pass of something that was half solvent and lost most of its film thickness as it cured. You are buying the build, not the brand name.
6. What do you do about cracks and control joints?
Cracks get filled with a product that flexes the way the coating over it flexes, or it telegraphs through within a season. Control joints are a separate decision: honoured, filled, or carried through the finish, and each has consequences. An installer who has a considered answer here has done this a lot. An installer who says cracks disappear has not.
7. When can I actually use it?
Foot traffic the next day is normal. Vehicles need longer, and how much longer depends on the product and the slab temperature while it cures, not on the calendar. Anybody quoting a single number for every job in every season is quoting from a brochure. You want a real answer for your floor.
8. Can I talk to somebody whose floor is like mine?
A beautiful residential garage tells you very little about whether somebody can put down a commercial kitchen floor that survives a health inspection. Ask for a reference on your kind of work, not a general list. Where a floor is in a building the public can walk into, ask if you can go and stand on it.
Two answers that should give you pause
“We can do it tomorrow.” Resin floors are booked as blocks because they cannot be half installed and left overnight. An outfit with immediate availability for a full system either had a cancellation, which happens, or is not doing the prep that takes the time.
“The price is per square foot, flat.” Square footage is one input. The condition of the slab, what has to come off first, and how much repair it needs move a number substantially. A firm price before anybody has seen the concrete is a price that has room built into it, or a price that will change.
Questions that depend on your room
If it is a commercial kitchen or a wash down area
Ask whether they are quoting epoxy or urethane cement, and ask what happens when boiling water hits the floor. Thermal shock is the thing that kills coatings in those rooms: the slab and the film expand at different rates and the bond gives up. Ask about cove base too. A floor that stops at the wall in a wet room leaves a seam for water to work into, and that is where failures start.
If it is a garage
Ask specifically about hot tire pickup and what in the system prevents it. Ask whether the flake is broadcast to refusal or scattered, because a light broadcast leaves thin spots that show as blotches once the clear goes over them. And ask what happens at the garage door edge, which is the most exposed foot of the whole floor.
If it is an older slab
Ask what they expect to find under whatever is on it now, and what changes if they are wrong. Old sealers, tile adhesive and decades of soaked in oil all come off mechanically, and the honest answer to how much is there is usually “we will know when we grind a test patch”.
What a fair quote looks like
Somebody comes out, looks at the floor, and grinds a test patch if there is any doubt about what is on it. You get told what system suits the room and why, what the prep involves, what the schedule is, and what the cure times are. If the slab has a problem, you hear about it then rather than after the deposit.
That visit should be free inside a normal service area, and nobody should be pressing you on the day. A floor is not an impulse purchase and a good installer knows it.
Questions people ask
Is the cheapest quote ever the right one?
Sometimes, when the slab is new and clean and the job is genuinely simple. More often the gap between two quotes is the prep, and that is the part you are actually buying. Ask both parties question one and compare the answers, not the totals.
Should I worry about a contractor who talks me out of something?
The opposite. Being told a slab needs repair first, or that the finish you saw in a photograph is wrong for your room, is a good sign. The uncomfortable conversation before the work is much cheaper than the one after it.
What paperwork should I expect?
Proof of insurance and licensing if you ask for it, and a written scope that names the system rather than saying “epoxy floor”. For a commercial job or a property manager, ask for the documentation on file before scheduling.
How do I check a reference properly?
Ask how long ago the floor went in. A floor that looks good after three months tells you nothing. A floor that looks good after four years tells you everything.
If you are collecting quotes, ask us the same eight questions you ask everybody else. Send us the details of the floor and we will come look at it. There are photographs of real jobs in the gallery, and the epoxy flooring and polished concrete pages explain how each system is actually built.
Ask us the hard ones
We would rather answer the awkward questions before the work than explain a failure after it. Call and put us through the list.