Polyaspartic floor coatings in San Francisco CA - a coating that grips the slab

Most people who ask me about it have an old coating that's letting go or bare concrete they're tired of, and they're weighing it against a cheaper epoxy floor. What you'll pay turns on the floor's size, the shape the slab is in, which product goes down and any custom touches like color. The schedule turns mostly on the slab, because moisture, fresh concrete or an old sealer has to be dealt with before anything goes on. It depends on your slab, so your own number comes from the estimate, after I've seen it.

Before anything gets quoted, I lay out the difference between a full polyaspartic system and a blend with epoxy layers, so you can weigh what's worth it for your floor. Clearing the space ahead of time helps us get straight to the concrete, and it saves you paying a crew to move boxes. Then we grind the slab with diamond tools to open up its pores, repair cracks and fill chipped spots, because a coating only holds as well as the surface it's gripping. DIY kits use acid etching instead, which gives a weaker bond, so whoever quotes your floor, ask how they'll prep it. Once the slab is sound and checked, we put down the system you chose.

Polyaspartic isn't the answer for every room. If the floor is more about looks than hard use, metallic epoxy flooring gives a glossy, swirled finish a polyaspartic coat won't. For a commercial kitchen or a room that gets hot washdowns, urethane cement flooring is the tougher choice, and I'll tell you at the estimate if your space is better suited to it.

In California, local air districts set and enforce the rules for coatings like this one. Here that's the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and its rule doesn't allow a coating to go down above its limits on VOCs, the volatile organic compounds that come off a coating as it cures, outside the exceptions the rule lists. That means the product an installer brings matters as much as the hands putting it down, so we choose ours to fit the district's limits.

A lot of what we see in San Francisco is garages under the house and older slabs carrying layers of paint or sealer from years back, and all of that comes off before a new coating goes on. We're based in San Francisco and work in the cities around it, so we run into the same floors on jobs in Daly City, down the Peninsula and across the Bay in Oakland.