Glendora Epoxy Flooring has been installing epoxy garage floors in Glendora, CA for more than 20 years, serving surrounding cities including Charter Oak, Citrus, San Dimas, Azusa and Covina. Most of the bays we coat are original to houses built between the 1950s and the 1970s, and that shapes almost every decision on the job — the width of the bay, the age of the slab, and what is going on underneath it.
A garage floor coating is not a paint job, and the difference shows up in the second or third year rather than on handover day. What separates a floor that lasts from one that peels is entirely in the preparation: whether the slab was tested for moisture, whether the surface was opened mechanically or chemically, and whether the product going down suits the concrete rather than the price point.
So the sequence we follow puts all of that first. The slab gets read before anything is ordered, the profile is ground open to a measurable standard, and the system is chosen for the bay it is going into. What follows is how each of those steps actually works.
Epoxy Garage Floor Systems We Install
100% Solids Epoxy Body Coats
A 100% solids epoxy contains no solvent to flash off, so what goes on the slab is what stays there — the applied thickness and the cured thickness are effectively the same. That is what lets it build a genuine mil thickness in a single pass and fill the minor texture left by grinding. It is the workhorse layer in most of the systems we install, and it goes between the primer and whatever finish coat the floor calls for.
Vinyl Flake Broadcast Systems
Flake is broadcast to refusal into a wet base coat, then scraped back and locked in under a clear urethane or polyaspartic topcoat. Beyond the appearance, the flake adds real thickness and hides the small imperfections that a solid color would highlight on a sixty-year-old slab. Blend and density are choices, not defaults — a full broadcast reads very differently from a light scatter that lets the base color show through.
Polyaspartic and Polyurea Topcoats
Polyaspartic and polyurea cure far faster than epoxy, hold their color under ultraviolet exposure, and stay flexible through the temperature swings an uninsulated garage sees. That combination is what makes a one-day installation possible and what stops the yellowing that shows up on an epoxy left as its own topcoat. On most garages we use epoxy to build the body and a polyaspartic clear to take the wear.
What the Slab Under Your Garage Decides
Moisture Testing Before Anything Is Ordered
Moisture moving up through a slab is the dominant cause of coating failure, and it is specifically excluded by almost every coating warranty on the market. We test with an in-situ relative humidity probe to the ASTM F2170 method, or with a calcium chloride test to ASTM F1869, and write the reading into the proposal. Both threshold numbers live in ASTM F710 rather than in the test methods themselves, which is a distinction a surprising number of contractors get wrong.
Opening a Mechanical Profile
Coatings bond to texture, not to a smooth or sealed surface. Diamond grinding opens the slab to a named ICRI concrete surface profile — the published scale runs from CSP 1 through CSP 10 — with the grit sequence matched to how hard the concrete actually is. Acid etching, still common on cheap installations, leaves residue behind and produces an inconsistent profile, which is why those floors come up in sheets.
Cracks, Spalls and Sixty Years of Oil
An original garage slab arrives with a history. Shrinkage and settlement cracks get chased open and filled with a rigid polyurea rather than smeared over, spalled areas are rebuilt to plane, and long-standing oil saturation has to be drawn out and the area re-ground before any coating will bond to it. Skipping this stage is why a new floor sometimes fails in exactly the spots that looked worst beforehand.
Our Step-by-Step Epoxy Garage Floor Process
1. Measure the Bay and Read the Slab
The bay is measured and the slab is tested on the estimate visit, not on the morning of the work. A two-car garage from the 1950s is materially narrower than a modern one, so the finished area is quoted from the actual measurement. The moisture reading, the crack map and the access route all go into the proposal at the same time.
2. Grind, Chase and Repair
Work starts with the diamond grinder and HEPA dust extraction running at the tool, which keeps the dust inside the garage instead of across the driveway and the cars. Once the profile is open, cracks are chased and filled, spalls are rebuilt, and the whole floor is vacuumed down. The slab is inspected again at this point, because grinding routinely exposes things the surface was hiding.
3. Prime and Build
The primer coat goes down onto a clean, dry, correctly profiled surface, followed by the epoxy body coat applied to a specified mil build with a notched squeegee and back-rolled to an even film. Where the moisture reading calls for it, a vapor barrier primer replaces the standard one at this stage rather than being added as an afterthought.
4. Broadcast and Scrape
Flake or a quartz aggregate is broadcast into the wet coat, then left to cure before being scraped and vacuumed back to a flat, even surface. This is the step that decides how the floor feels underfoot, and it is slower than it looks — a rushed scrape leaves sharp edges standing up that will be obvious the first time somebody kneels on the floor.
5. Topcoat and Hand Over
The clear topcoat goes on last, carrying any slip-resistant additive the floor needs, cut in by hand at the perimeter and at the door threshold where the machine cannot reach. You get the cure schedule in writing — when foot traffic is safe, when general use is safe, and when vehicles can come back.
Choosing a Finish for a Glendora Garage
Flake Blends Seen on Your Own Slab
Flake blends look different in a binder under showroom light than they do on your concrete in daylight, which is why we lay a sample on the actual floor before anything is ordered. Blend names carry real weight in this trade and homeowners often arrive already knowing the one they want, so it is worth seeing the real thing rather than a printed chip.
Metallic and Solid Color Options
A metallic finish uses a pigmented resin manipulated while wet to produce depth and marbling, and no two floors come out identical — that is the point of it, and it is not for everyone. A solid color under a clear topcoat is the cleaner, more predictable option, though it shows slab imperfections more readily than a flake system does.
Slip Resistance and the Topcoat
A smooth clear topcoat is genuinely slick when wet, and a garage floor gets wet every time a car comes in during rain. Aluminum oxide or a graded quartz broadcast worked into the topcoat raises the measured coefficient of friction in a controlled way, and how much goes in is a decision about how the bay is actually used rather than a standard addition.
- 20+ Years Experience
- Every Slab Moisture Tested
- Written System Spec