Bolingbrook Epoxy Flooring has installed epoxy garage floors for 20+ years in Bolingbrook, IL, serving surrounding cities including Lemont, Warrenville, Burr Ridge, Hinsdale and Shorewood. Each garage gets the same preparation regardless of its size: diamond grinding, a moisture test, crack and joint repair, then a coating system named in writing down to its finished thickness.
Most garage coatings that fail do so for reasons visible before the first coat, such as a sealed or painted surface, a slab pushing vapor, or a crack that is still moving. We look for all three during the estimate, price the fixes as separate lines, and tell you plainly when a slab should be replaced rather than coated.
The result is a floor that sheds road salt, releases hot tires, wipes clean of oil and makes a two-car garage feel like part of the house. Pricing is per square foot for the system we actually propose, so two quotes can be compared line by line.
Garage Floor Coating Systems We Install
Full-Broadcast Vinyl Flake Epoxy
Our most common garage floor is a pigmented 100% solids epoxy base coat broadcast to refusal with vinyl flake, scraped, then sealed with a clear polyaspartic topcoat. Broadcasting to refusal means the chips cover the base completely, which hides slab blemishes and builds a thick, textured surface.
The topcoat is what you actually walk and drive on. A polyaspartic topcoat resists ultraviolet ambering at the open door, cures fast enough to finish in one long day in good conditions, and gives the hardness that keeps a hot tire from pulling the system off the slab.
Metallic and Solid Color Garage Floors
A metallic epoxy garage floor uses pearlescent pigment in clear epoxy, worked wet into a marbled finish. It looks striking in a showroom-style garage but shows scratches and grit more than flake does, so we discuss how the garage is used before recommending it.
Solid color systems suit working garages and shops, where a bright gray or tan floor makes dropped screws easy to find. They can be finished with a light aggregate in the topcoat for grip.
Polyaspartic One-Day Garage Floors
A polyaspartic or polyurea system can go from grinding to final coat in a single day, which matters when a car has to be back inside by evening. The fast cure narrows the working window, so it takes a crew used to the product, and we still test the slab for moisture first, because speed does not change what is coming up through the concrete.
Preparing a Bolingbrook Garage Slab
Diamond Grinding to a Measured Profile
We grind every garage slab with diamond tooling to an ICRI concrete surface profile, usually CSP 2 or 3 for a broadcast system, and vacuum the dust at the grinder as we go. We do not acid etch, which leaves a weak surface paste and pushes water into concrete we are about to test.
Grinding also tells us what the slab is made of. Soft spots, delaminated patches and old sealers show up under the grinder in a way they never do from a visual walk-through, and anything found is fixed before coating.
Testing for Moisture Under a Garage
The model residential code exempts garages from the vapor retarder required under heated living space, and Bolingbrook’s own detached-garage handout calls for a 4-inch slab on 4 inches of stone with wire mesh and lists no vapor retarder. We therefore assume nothing about what sits under your slab and test it.
A calcium chloride test under ASTM F1869 measures the moisture vapor emission rate at the surface, while ASTM F2170 probes read relative humidity inside the slab. The results decide whether the floor needs a moisture-mitigation primer, and that primer is named in the quote rather than added after the floor blisters.
Crack, Spall and Joint Repair
Shrinkage cracks are routed open and filled with an epoxy or polyurea crack filler, then ground flush. Spalled patches where salt has scaled the surface are rebuilt with an epoxy mortar so the coating sits on a level, sound substrate.
Control joints are a choice: we can fill them for a seamless look, or honor them so the slab can keep moving without cracking the coating along a line. Cracks with displacement, settled sections or a slab draining toward the house mean the slab needs repair or replacement first, and we say so.
Built for Will County Winters
Road Salt and Calcium Chloride Brine
The brine dripping off a car in January is not just water. Calcium chloride deicers form an expansive compound with concrete at temperatures between roughly 32 and 122 degrees, which is why bare garage slabs scale and pit even when the garage stays above freezing.
A coated garage floor keeps that brine on the surface, where it can be squeegeed out the door. We coat the full slab, edges and repaired joints included, because the place a coating stops is the place salt gets underneath it.
Coating Season for Unheated Garages
Epoxy and polyaspartic coatings need a slab within a temperature range to cure, and a surface comfortably above the dew point so condensation does not form under the wet coat. The Romeoville weather station averages its last spring freeze around April 20 and its first fall freeze around October 22.
An unheated garage is usually coated between those dates. A heated garage can be done any month, and when an unheated one cannot, we tell you it has to wait for spring rather than coating a cold slab that never reaches full cure.
Hot Tires and Snowmelt
A car pulling in after a long winter drive carries hot tires and a load of slush, and both test a coating. Hot tire pickup happens when a thin or poorly bonded coating softens and lifts under a warm tread, so our garage systems combine a ground surface, a full-thickness base and a hard topcoat chosen to release.
Attached Garages, Slope and the Step to the House
Bolingbrook’s garage handout sets the attached garage floor 6 inches below the adjoining house floor where a door opens between them, and asks for a back-to-front pitch of at least 2 percent. Both are there for a reason: spilled fuel and meltwater should run out the overhead door, not toward the living space.
We keep that geometry intact. Broadcast systems follow the existing slope rather than leveling it, and the coating stops cleanly at the step and the threshold so the drop to the house is preserved. Where an older slab has settled and now drains toward the house, we tell you before quoting, because no coating fixes a floor that pitches the wrong way.
Townhome and Shared-Wall Garages
Many single-family attached homes in the village have smaller garages built around two parking spaces. The system is the same, but scheduling matters more when neighbors share a driveway, so we plan the grinding day and the cure window with you and keep equipment and dust off shared surfaces.
Our Epoxy Garage Floor Process
Step 1: Slab Walk and Written Proposal
We measure the garage, read cracks, joints, stains and old coatings, check the slope toward the door and note the step into the house. The proposal names the product, system build, finished thickness and price per square foot, and lists the warranty exclusions, with moisture first.
Step 2: Contract and Moisture Test
For home jobs you receive a written contract and the Home Repair: Know Your Consumer Rights pamphlet before any work starts, as the Illinois Home Repair and Remodeling Act requires. The slab is then tested for moisture so the primer choice rests on a number.
Step 3: Grinding and Repair
Install day starts with diamond grinding, dust collection at the grinder, crack and spall repair, and a final vacuum. Grinding dust is never rinsed out the door toward the driveway or storm inlet.
Step 4: Base Coat, Broadcast and Topcoat
The base coat goes down, flake is broadcast, excess chips are scraped and vacuumed, and the clear topcoat seals the system. Slab temperature and dew point are checked before each coat, and the cure time to foot and vehicle traffic is set from those readings.
- 20+ Years Coating Concrete
- Moisture Testing in Every Scope
- Free Written Estimates