Sarnia Epoxy Flooring
Sarnia Epoxy Flooring coats garage, basement, shop and plant concrete across Sarnia, Point Edward and Lambton County. We grind the slab back, fix what is broken in it, and install a resin floor built to still be sound in twenty years.
Most jobs here end up as a chip build under a polyaspartic wear layer. It suits this city for reasons that have nothing to do with looks, and everything to do with what a slab here has to put up with between November and April.
Nothing is priced until the floor has been measured and the slab has been read for moisture. The number we write is the number you pay. Ring +1 226-406-4401 and we will come and put eyes on it.
Where the floor is, roughly how big, and what happens on it. We can work from that. Or call +1 226-406-4401.
We work in Sarnia and Lambton County. Not all of southwestern Ontario, not London when it goes quiet here. This city, its neighbourhoods and the clay under them.
That is worth more than it sounds. We already know how the post-war slabs in Wiltshire Park and Coronation Park behave, what to expect from a Bright's Grove basement close to the lake, and how a floor in a Point Edward garage differs from one in a newer Blackwell subdivision.
You deal with the person doing the work. One person does the dimensions, the moisture reading, the pricing and the grinding. Nothing gets passed to a sub.
Every job comes with a written specification, so you can see exactly what you are buying and hold us to it. Where a slab should not be coated at all, you hear it from us before any money changes hands.
Ten builds. Which one you get depends on what the slab is carrying and what happens on top of it.
A garage floor coating shuts the concrete off from road salt, brine and meltwater. Letting those in is what finishes most garage floors in this city. The slab is opened up, made good, and given a chip system under a polyaspartic wear layer, built for concrete that gets driven on right through the winter.
View Garage Floor Coating
A flake system is a resin base with vinyl chip thrown into it wet, then locked under a clear polyaspartic wear layer. It is the system we install most often in Sarnia because the texture gives grip on a floor that spends half the year wet, and the chip pattern hides the dirt a garage actually collects.
View Flake Epoxy Flooring
Polyaspartic is a resin that keeps hardening in cold that shuts epoxy down, reaches service strength in hours rather than days, and holds its colour under ultraviolet light. It is our standard top coat in Sarnia, and on some floors we build the whole system from it, because a slab in an unheated garage here sits below epoxy's working range for half the year.
View Polyaspartic Floor Coating
Concrete floor coating covers everything we install on a bare slab, whether it ends up as a flake floor, a solid colour or a plain sealed surface. The job is the same underneath: open the concrete, repair it, test it, and put a resin system on it that keeps water out. On Sarnia clay, keeping water out is the whole point.
View Concrete Floor Coating
Basement floor coating takes a cold, dusty slab and leaves you with a sealed surface you can mop and a room that is noticeably brighter. In Sarnia it is also the job where preparation matters most, because the clay under this city holds water against your basement slab and drives it upward as vapour. We test every basement before we quote, and the reading decides what we can install.
View Basement Floor Coating
Commercial epoxy flooring gives a shop, clinic, kitchen or showroom a seamless floor with no grout lines to hold dirt, no tiles to lift and nothing for a mop to catch on. We phase the work around your opening hours so you keep trading, and we give you a cure schedule you can put in a calendar rather than a vague promise.
View Commercial Epoxy Flooring
Industrial and warehouse flooring is specified around what actually happens on the floor: forklift traffic, dropped steel, solvent and chemical spills, hot work and regular wash-down. Sarnia has three refineries and more than thirty chemical plants, plus the fabricators, machine shops and contractors that serve them, and those floors need a different build from a garage.
View Industrial and Warehouse Flooring
Epoxy floor repair and recoating is for floors that have started peeling, bubbling, chalking or lifting off in sheets. The failed build comes off, we work out what killed it, the concrete gets repaired, and the replacement is chosen to beat whatever that was. In Sarnia the cause is usually one of two things, and neither of them is the colour you chose.
View Epoxy Floor Repair and Recoating
Patio and outdoor concrete coating seals porches, walkways, pool surrounds and covered patios with a UV-stable polyaspartic and an anti-slip aggregate. Outdoor concrete in Sarnia takes the full freeze-thaw cycle with nothing above it to moderate the temperature, plus wind and driven rain off Lake Huron, so the specification is not the same as an indoor floor.
View Patio and Outdoor Concrete Coating
Metallic floors are made by working reflective pigment through clear resin while it is still moving, so the result has depth and drift in it instead of one flat colour. No two are the same. It belongs indoors, in rooms that get looked at and spent time in, rather than in a garage that parks a salty vehicle every night.
View Metallic Epoxy FlooringThe slab stops drinking. Salt, brine, oil and antifreeze stay on the surface where you can wipe them off, rather than being drawn down into the concrete. That absorption is what finishes most garage floors in this city.
Freeze-thaw damage stops where it is. Water cannot get into a sealed slab, so it cannot freeze inside it and keep splitting it apart.
The grey dust goes away. A bare slab sheds fine powder constantly onto tools, boxes and car paint. A coated one does not.
Cleaning turns into sweeping. A push broom and a damp mop handle a coated floor that used to need a pressure washer.
The room gets brighter. A coated floor bounces light around a garage or basement that used to absorb it, with no change to the lighting.
Spills wipe up. Oil, brake fluid and battery acid stay on the surface long enough to clean rather than staining the slab permanently.
The floor gets grip. Flake builds texture underfoot, and extra aggregate goes in where a floor gets wet.
Broken concrete gets cut out, filled and levelled while we are there, so what you end up standing on is flat as well as sealed.
Say what actually happens in that room and we will name the build that suits it. Now and then that turns out to be the least expensive one on the list.
Sarnia has an unusual winter, and it is hard on concrete in a very specific way.
January here averages a high of zero and a low of minus seven. Lake Huron and the St. Clair River hold the city close to the freezing point instead of letting it settle well below, the way inland cities do. So the temperature does not sit frozen. It crosses zero, then crosses back, over and over.
That crossing is the damage. Water works into the pores and hairline cracks of a slab, freezes, expands by roughly nine percent, and pushes the concrete apart from the inside. Then it thaws and the water goes deeper. A Sarnia garage floor can go through that cycle dozens of times in one winter, where a slab in a colder city freezes once in November and stays frozen.
Add the road salt that comes off your vehicle and it accelerates. Brine lowers the freezing point, so the slab keeps cycling on days that should have been safely frozen, and the salt attacks the cement paste while it does it.
You see the result at the door line first. Pitting, then flaking, then a soft grey layer that comes off on your shoe. That is the top of the slab breaking up.
A sealed floor does not take water in, so there is nothing in there to freeze.
The second thing about Sarnia floors is under them, and it is the reason more coatings fail here than anywhere else we work.
Sarnia sits on the bed of a glacial lake. The soil is heavy grey clay, deep and almost watertight. It was good enough to build the city's brick out of, which tells you how fine it is. What it does not do is drain.
Rain and snowmelt cannot soak away through clay, so water sits against the underside of your slab for weeks. The concrete wicks it upward as vapour. That vapour has to go somewhere, and if there is a coating in the way it pushes against the underside of it until the bond gives out.
That is what causes the bubbles, the milky patches and the sheets of coating that peel off in one piece. It is not a bad product. It is a slab that was never tested.
So we test. Every floor, before we quote, and the reading decides the specification rather than the other way round. On a wet slab we use a primer built for moisture. On a very wet one we tell you a coating is the wrong purchase and explain what to fix first.
Nothing gets quoted off a photo and a square footage.
We take a relative humidity reading inside the slab, not just on the surface. In Sarnia clay that number is the single best predictor of whether a floor will still be attached in five years, and it is not something you can judge by eye. Dry-looking concrete can be carrying a lot of water.
We check for old sealer. Many slabs here were sealed once when the house was built, and resin will not bond through it.
We look at the cracks and work out whether they are shrinkage cracks that can be filled or structural movement that will keep moving.
We check the fall of the floor and where water ends up, because a coating will not fix a drainage problem, it will only hide it for a while.
Then the specification gets written out: build, thickness, colour, how the slab is prepared, how long before you can use it, and the price. If the reading says do not coat this floor, that is what we tell you.
A lot of this city was built in one go. Polymer Corporation arrived in 1942, the refineries and chemical plants grew up around it, and Sarnia filled in with subdivisions through the fifties and sixties.
Those slabs are now sixty to eighty years old, and they were poured to the standards of the day. Thin in places, no vapour barrier underneath, and a lot of them have been salted every winter since.
They can absolutely be coated, and they usually look better afterwards than a new slab does. But they need more prep. Expect more grinding, more crack repair, and a primer chosen for a slab with nothing between it and the clay.
Newer pours in Blackwell, Rapids Parkway and the subdivisions off Modeland Road are a different job. Sound concrete, a vapour barrier underneath, and usually a straightforward install.
We price the two differently because they are not the same amount of work, and we will show you which one you have before you decide anything.
Park a daily driver in it through a Sarnia winter and you want chip under a polyaspartic wear layer. It handles road salt, hot tires and dropped tools, and the texture matters when you come in off a wet driveway.
A basement wants the moisture reading first and a decision second. Where the slab is dry enough, flake or a solid colour both work well. Where it is not, there is a primer for that, and sometimes there is not.
A workshop floor wants a harder, thicker build than a garage, because the damage there is dropped steel and dragged equipment rather than salt.
A shop, showroom or clinic usually wants a solid colour or a light flake blend, installed in phases so you can keep trading.
A plant or warehouse floor is specified around forklift traffic, wash-down and line marking, and often has to go in over a shutdown weekend.
Anything outdoors wants a light-stable polyaspartic carrying aggregate. Clear epoxy out there goes amber.
Flake blends are the usual choice, and there are a lot of them. Greys and blue-greys go into most Sarnia garages. Tans and browns are the ones that hide tracked-in dirt. Save the louder blends for a room people actually sit in.
Solid colours give a cleaner, more commercial look. They show tyre marks and dust more readily than flake does, which is why we steer most garages towards flake.
Metallic finishes are a different product entirely, poured and worked so the pigment moves. They belong indoors, in rooms people spend time in.
Gloss is adjustable. High gloss is easiest to clean and reflects the most light. A satin finish hides surface imperfection better and is less slippery to look at, though the grip comes from aggregate, not from the sheen.
Bring us a colour you like and we will show you what it looks like at floor scale, which is rarely what people expect from a chip sample.
Often, but it depends on the slab rather than the date.
Ordinary epoxy needs the slab sitting above roughly ten degrees. Under that it goes thick and sluggish, and it can simply stop hardening, leaving a soft floor that gives out early. An unheated Sarnia garage sits below ten degrees from late October to April.
Polyaspartic is the reason winter work is possible here. It carries on hardening in cold that stops epoxy dead, and it holds its colour.
We measure the slab, not the air. Concrete lags the air temperature by a long way, and a garage that feels fine at lunchtime can have a slab well below what the resin needs.
Where the numbers do not work we heat the space. Where heat will not bridge the gap, we hand you a spring date instead of taking a deposit against a floor that will not hold.
Professionally installed coatings in Ontario generally run about five to nine dollars a square foot for epoxy and six to twelve for polyaspartic, with flake systems in between and metallic finishes at the top.
For a single garage of around 250 square feet that puts most jobs somewhere between two and three thousand dollars. A double at 450 square feet is usually three to five.
There is a floor to our pricing, around two thousand dollars, and most installers have one. The grinder, the extraction gear and the crew cost the same to put on a truck for a small bay as a large one.
What actually moves the price is preparation, not resin. A sound newer slab is quick. A sixty-year-old slab with spalling at the door and a high moisture reading takes far longer, and that is where the difference shows up.
Retail kits look cheap by comparison. They are a fraction of the thickness of a professional build and they go on over an etched rather than a ground slab, which is why so many of them peel within a couple of winters. We remove a lot of them.
Get the number in writing before anyone starts. Ours includes prep, materials, labour, cure times and the specification.
Put in properly, a polyaspartic build is a fifteen to twenty year floor, and epoxy in the right room will run past twenty.
The variable is not the resin. It is what happened to the slab beforehand, and the moisture reading that never got taken.
Floors that fail early nearly always share one of a few causes: the slab was etched instead of ground, water was coming up through it, the build was too thin, or a new coating went over a failing old one.
Do it properly once and the maintenance is sweeping and the occasional mop. Nearly every floor we lay wants a new wear layer well before it wants replacing, and that is a much smaller job than the first one.
Sarnia has an industrial base that most cities its size do not. Three refineries and more than thirty chemical plants sit along the St. Clair River, and around them is a whole layer of contractors, fabricators, machine shops and service companies.
Those floors have different requirements from a garage. They take forklift traffic, dropped steel, hot work, solvent spills and regular wash-down, and they usually need line marking that will not be worn off by the end of the year.
They also cannot be shut for a week. We phase industrial work around turnarounds, shutdowns and weekends, coat in bays, and give you a cure schedule you can actually plan production around.
If you need a specification you can hand to a safety officer or an insurer, we will write one.
Sweep it. Road grit is abrasive, and rolling a wheel over it is the quickest way to thin a coating in the wheel paths.
Rinse the salt off in late winter. It will not damage the coating, but it sits in a film and it is easier to remove before it dries out.
Use a flat mop and a neutral cleaner. Skip anything with citrus or solvent in it, and never use a steam mop.
Put a mat under the vehicle if it comes home loaded with brine, and pull it up occasionally so the floor underneath dries.
Get the top coat refreshed when the gloss starts to go flat at the tyre tracks. That is the coating telling you it has taken the wear instead of the concrete, which is what it is for.
Acid etching instead of grinding. The most common cause by a distance. Etching does not open the concrete properly, so the resin sits on the slab rather than keying into it.
Moisture from below. In Sarnia clay this is the one that catches people out, and it is invisible until the coating starts lifting.
Resin laid over a layer that was already letting go. New resin bonded to a bad bond is still a bad bond.
Too thin a build. There is barely any material in a boxed kit compared with a proper build, so there is not much between your tyres and the concrete.
Hot tyre pickup. A cheap coating goes soft under a warm tyre and lifts with it when you drive off. A proper polyaspartic top coat does not.
Clear epoxy outdoors. It yellows in sunlight. Outdoor slabs need a UV-stable product.
We arrive, empty and mask the space, and protect anything staying in the room.
The slab gets diamond ground. We never acid etch. Grinding opens the pores so the resin has somewhere mechanical to hold. Etching does not, and that one choice separates a twenty year floor from a three year one.
Cracks, pitting and spalled edges get cut out and repaired with a patching compound that takes coating.
We take a final moisture reading on the opened slab, because grinding sometimes changes what you find.
The primer goes down, chosen against that reading.
The base coat goes on and the chip is thrown into it wet, right up to refusal, which is what makes the colour even rather than patchy.
Once cured, the loose flake is scraped and vacuumed back to a flat surface.
The polyaspartic wear layer follows, once or twice over as specified, carrying aggregate wherever the floor needs to be non-slip.
We walk the finished floor with you, hand over the care instructions and tell you exactly when you can walk on it and when you can park on it.
A cross section of what we have laid down lately, from single bays to warehouse slabs.
We cover the whole of Sarnia, including Bright's Grove, Blackwell, Huron Heights, Wiltshire Park, Oak Acres, Coronation Park, Sherwood Village and Mitton Village, all of which came into the city when Sarnia and Clearwater amalgamated in 1991.
Point Edward is next door but it is still its own village. It voted itself out of that amalgamation and stayed independent, and we work there regularly.
South along the river we cover Corunna, Mooretown, Brigden and Courtright in St. Clair Township. East and north we take in Wyoming, Petrolia, Camlachie, Forest and the Lambton Shores lakefront.
If you are unsure whether you are in our area, call and ask. It takes a minute on the phone and saves you guessing.
We come once, read the slab, and hand you a number that does not move. +1 226-406-4401.
For most properties, yes, and the reason is the freeze-thaw pattern here. Sarnia sits close to the freezing point all winter rather than well below it, so a slab crosses zero repeatedly instead of freezing once. Every crossing drives water deeper into the concrete and splits it a little further. Sealing the surface stops water getting in, which stops the cycle before it starts. Weigh two decades of service against repeatedly patching a spalling slab, or against pouring a new one, and the sums generally come out in favour.
Because of the clay. Sarnia is built on a glacial lake bed, and heavy clay does not drain, so water sits against the underside of your slab and gets wicked up through the concrete as vapour. If a coating is in the way, that vapour pushes on it until the bond fails, and you get bubbling and peeling that look like a product fault but are not. The reading tells us which primer to use, or whether to coat at all. It takes minutes and it costs you nothing.
Usually. Polyaspartic is our default wear layer partly because it carries on hardening well below the point where epoxy quits, and we bring heat in when the reading asks for it. The figure that matters is the one off the concrete, not the one in the air. If the concrete will not come up, spring is the answer, because a floor laid too cold gives out and you end up buying it twice.
Possibly, but the reading comes first and it might say no. There are primers built for damp slabs and they work well within a range. Beyond that range no coating will stay attached, and the honest answer is to fix the water before you spend money on a floor. We will tell you which side of that line you are on before you commit to anything.
No, and neither should anyone else. Peeling means the bond underneath has failed, so new resin over it inherits the same failure. It has to come off with a grinder. Then the bare slab gets read, the concrete gets made good, and the replacement is specified against the actual cause, which in this city is nearly always water or a slab that was etched instead of opened up. Where the body of the floor is still bonded and only the wear layer has gone, you are looking at an abrade and a fresh top coat, at a small fraction of the cost. A photograph usually settles which of the two you have.
Room, rough dimensions, and what happens on the concrete. From that we can get a visit booked and put a real price together. If you would sooner just talk, +1 226-406-4401. Prefer to talk it through? Call +1 226-406-4401.
