Epoxy floor repair when the first coating let go

Signs your garage coating is failing

• Peeling where your tires park, especially after hot summer drives
• Chips and flakes along joints, cracks or the edges by the walls
• A blotchy or splotchy topcoat, dull in some spots and glossy in others
• Yellowing near the garage door where the sun hits
• Bubbles or soft spots where moisture is pushing up from the slab
• Old garage paint wearing through to bare concrete

Patching one bad spot rarely holds, because the same problem usually sits under the whole floor. In most cases the right fix is to take the failed coating off and start again from sound concrete.

Why coated floors fail

Most failures come down to three things, and the product is only one of them.

1. Prep that got skipped. A coating only grabs concrete that's been opened up by a diamond grinder. Acid washing, a quick sweep, or rolling paint over a dirty floor leaves nothing for the coating to hold onto. Saw cuts that weren't ground out, cracks that weren't repaired, and uneven edges all show through later.
2. Moisture in the slab. Water coming up through concrete has to escape somewhere. Coat over a damp floor and it pushes the coating off from underneath.
3. The wrong product for a garage. Store-bought epoxy and garage paint have their place, but hot tires, road salt and summer sun are hard on them. Epoxy also yellows in sunlight, which is why our polyurea vs. epoxy page goes into the details.

How we redo a failed floor

1. Look first. Text us close-ups of the peeling edges and one wide shot of the whole floor, or we'll come take a look. We want to know what's down there and how well it's stuck.
2. Grind it off. We diamond grind through the failed coating until we reach clean, sound concrete.
3. Fix the concrete. Cracks, pits and joints get filled with polygrout. Hairline cracks get cut out and stitched, and shark fins along the walls get knocked down. If the slab is damp, we wait and dry it out before going further.
4. Recoat. Polyurea base coat, full flake broadcast in the color you pick, polyaspartic topcoat. The same system we put down on every floor.

If we find more damage once the old coating is off, we stop and tell you before doing any extra work, and any added cost gets approved in writing first.

What you end up with

A floor we redo carries the same limited lifetime residential warranty as a fresh one: covered against peeling, chipping, blistering, fading and delamination from our install or the material, for as long as you own the home. Cracks that open from the slab moving aren't covered by any coating warranty, ours included.

Floors we fix across the area

We redo failed floors in Howell, South Lyon and throughout Livingston and Oakland counties.

Epoxy repair questions