Upper Bucks, straight down the 663
Quakertown is twenty minutes from the shop. Upper Bucks is closer to Boyertown than a good deal of our own county.
Where we work
Coating floors across Bucks County
Route 663 runs east out of the Boyertown area and lands in Upper Bucks at Quakertown, which makes the northern end of this county closer to us than Kutztown or Hamburg are. Bucks has a reputation built on its lower half, the dense Philadelphia commuter belt along the Delaware, and that is not the part we work. Upper Bucks is small boroughs, farmland and the Pennridge townships, and it behaves far more like Berks than like Bensalem.
The building pattern up here is the one we know well. Proper old borough cores at Quakertown, Perkasie and Sellersville with housing that goes back well over a century, then a ring of development from the last forty years wrapped around each of them. Two completely different kinds of concrete inside the same postcode.
Being local matters more than it sounds. We coat floors in these conditions every week.
Cobra Epoxy, Boyertown PAThe concrete around here
The borough properties have the deep basements, thin slabs and small detached garages you would expect, and they get the moisture question asked first. The newer townships have attached two and three bay garages on sound modern slabs, where the work is quick and the result is immediate.
What is slightly different about Upper Bucks is how much of it is still rural. There are working farms, outbuildings, equipment sheds and barns with concrete floors poured at various points across the last century, some of them level and some of them enthusiastically not. Those are interesting jobs and they need looking at before anybody quotes them.
What we get called for
What Bucks County asks us for most
Every service runs across the whole county. These are simply the three that come up most often here.
Garage Epoxy Flooring
Coved base, cut termination at the door, and a slab that was opened up properly first.
Basement Epoxy Flooring
Turns the coldest room in the house into one somebody would actually sit in.
Flake Epoxy Flooring
Pick a blend at the walkthrough with real samples in your own light.
Towns we cover here: Quakertown·Perkasie·Sellersville·Dublin
What Upper Bucks weather does to a slab
Upper Bucks runs through the same roughly forty freeze and thaw cycles a winter as the rest of our patch. Water works into the pore structure of bare concrete, freezes overnight, expands by about nine percent and pushes the surface apart from the inside, then thaws and goes deeper. Five or six winters of that turns a smooth slab into a pitted one.
What is slightly particular here is how rural much of it still is. Long unsheltered driveways, farm tracks and outbuildings mean concrete that never dries out properly between weather, plus tree cover on a lot of the older properties that keeps surfaces damp well into the day. Damp concrete going into a freeze is concrete losing surface.
Route 309 and Route 663 also carry a serious winter salting programme, and everything that goes on those roads comes home on the underside of a car and drips onto a garage floor overnight. Sealing the surface is the only part of that chain a homeowner actually controls.
The order the work happens in
Clear and mask first, which is why the room has to be completely empty before we arrive. A slab cannot be ground in patches around obstacles, because ground and unground areas take the coating differently and the join always shows.
Then grinding, which is the longest and dustiest stage and the one that decides whether the floor lasts. Extraction runs the whole time the machines do, both for the mess and because silica off dry ground concrete is a genuine exposure issue.
Then repair, then the base coat, then the flake broadcast by hand into the wet base until it will not take any more. Those three run together on the same day because the base has a working time and the chip has to be in before it closes.
Day two is the scrape back, the vacuum, and the polyaspartic. You can normally walk on it that evening, put things back the next day, and park on a garage floor after about three days.
On the map
Getting to you from Boyertown
Bucks County is inside our normal working radius, which runs roughly fifty miles out from Boyertown. The county seat is Doylestown.
If your town is not on the list above, that does not mean we do not cover it. Call and ask. We would rather tell you honestly than send somebody on a two hour round trip, and we would rather hear from you than have you assume.
Questions
Working in Bucks County
The questions that come up most on calls from this part of the patch.
Do you charge extra for distance?
Not within the normal radius, no. At the far edge, and for a genuinely small single item, we will have an honest conversation about whether the trip stands up on its own or whether it is better paired with something else nearby. What we will not do is quietly price the drive in and hope it goes unnoticed.
How long have you been doing this?
The company is three years old and the people in it have considerably more time than that in and around the trades. It started because Jimmy and Justyn were tired of watching flooring work done badly, which is not a marketing origin story so much as the reason the preparation stage gets the time it does.
Will a coating fix a damp basement?
No, and anybody who says it will is selling you a problem. A coating seals the top of the slab, it does not stop water arriving underneath it. If vapour is pushing up hard enough, sealing the surface traps the pressure and the coating lifts in sheets. That is why we measure before we specify, and why the honest answer is occasionally to fix the drainage first.
Can you coat a garage floor in winter?
Yes, interior floors go in all year. A closed garage holds enough temperature to cure the system, and we will bring heat if a slab is genuinely cold. Winter is often the easier time to book because exterior work is out of season, so the schedule is more open.
What happens to the cracks in my slab?
They get repaired before anything is coated. Cracks, divots, pits and spalled areas are cut out where they need it, filled and levelled so the finished floor is flat. Coating over a crack simply prints its shape through the surface, and it will open again anyway.
Do you charge for the visit?
No. The walkthrough is free and there is nothing attached to it. A fair share of them end with somebody deciding to do it next year, or deciding the drainage needs sorting first, and that is a perfectly good outcome. Being small and local means a visit that does not turn into work costs us twenty minutes of driving rather than something we have to recover elsewhere.
How many people will be here?
Usually two or three depending on the size of the floor. The flake broadcast in particular is a two person job, because the chip has to go in across the whole area inside the working time of the base coat. On a large commercial floor there will be more, and Justyn is on site for all of it.
Can you do it soon?
Sometimes, and it is always worth asking. Jobs move and finish early, and when a day opens up it gets offered to whoever is flexible and nearby. Tell us if your dates are loose. What we will not do is squeeze you in by cutting the grinding short.
Book a walkthrough
Book a walkthrough in Bucks County
Tell us the town, the space and roughly what condition the concrete is in. Jimmy comes back within a business day and arranges to walk it with you.
Everything we lay is made in the USA. The crew and the equipment are OSHA certified, and residential interior floors are covered for life. PA HIC 177204.
If you would rather speak to somebody, (484) 942-3219. If photographs are easier, jfaust@cobraepoxy.com. Either way the contact page has everything in one place.
Tell us about the floor
Jimmy calls back within a business day, walks the space with you, and puts real pricing in your hands.
Also covered: Berks County, Montgomery County, Chester County, Lehigh County, Lancaster County. Browse the full list of services, see finished work in the gallery, or get in touch.