Polished concrete flooring in San Francisco, CA - a shine your slab can really give

Most people who call us have concrete they're tired of covering up. It might be a slab under old carpet or tile, a garage they want to use as a room, or a shop floor that's dusty and gray. Your price depends on the square footage, how deep we grind to show the stone you want and how high a shine you're after. It also depends on whether glue or an old coating has to come off first, which is its own stripping and removal step. The schedule depends on the same things, plus how much of the space you can clear at once. The estimate gives you a price for each look and tells you what each one means for your timing.

Your existing slab decides how much stone can show. So I start by looking at what's there and helping you pick a look and a shine your concrete can really give, not one that only works on somebody else's floor. Once you've chosen, our crew grinds the floor with coarse diamonds down to the depth you picked. Then we work through finer and finer passes until the scratches from each step are gone, and we polish it to the sheen you chose. We judge the polish on the bare concrete before any sealer goes on, because sealer can hide sloppy grinding and I want you to see what you're really getting.

Polishing works with the color your concrete already has. If you want warmer or deeper tones, stained concrete flooring puts color into the slab, and it can be polished afterward. If you want far more stone and color than an existing slab holds, terrazzo flooring is poured with the chips you pick, so it's a better route than grinding deeper.

Grinding concrete makes fine crystalline silica dust. California's state guidance calls that dust a known cause of cancer that can lead to silicosis, a lung disease with no cure that's often fatal. The state's workplace silica rule says floor grinders have to run with water fed steadily to the cutting surface, or with a dust collection system the grinder's maker recommends. Indoors, loose dust has to be cleared between passes with a HEPA vacuum, the kind built for fine dust. Our crew works to that rule, and it's a fair thing to ask any crew you're comparing.

Here, a lot of our polishing calls come from garages and ground-floor rooms under houses and flats. Others come from street-level shops and offices where the concrete spent years under carpet, tile or paint. We're based in San Francisco and work in the cities around it, down the Peninsula and across the Bay, and we get the same kinds of calls in Daly City and Oakland.