A garage floor that shrugs off what the 422 tracks home
From November to March every car on the Route 422 corridor picks up salt and parks it on bare concrete overnight. Around Amity Township that happens in new two car garages and old river side outbuildings alike, and a sealed floor is how you stop it.
Salt water left overnight does the real harm
Ask what wrecks a house slab in Berks County and the answer is dull. It is salty water sitting on bare concrete through the night. The car comes up the driveway, slush melts out of the wheel wells, and a puddle soaks into the floor while everyone sleeps. Do that every night from the first snow to the thaw and the surface starts to pit, then scale away in patches.
So the case for coating a garage around Douglassville is about the salt first and the looks second, and an old hand poured slab loses ground to it fastest. A sealed floor gives that water nothing to soak into. Meanwhile the bare apron outside the door keeps getting a little worse every winter, which is a fair preview of what the inside would have done.
The newer garage set back off the highway
A lot of Amity Township went up from the nineteen nineties onward, back from the 422, and most of those houses came with an attached two car garage. The slabs in them are usually flat, modern and in decent condition, which makes them some of the most straightforward floors on our schedule.
The work runs in a fixed order. The whole slab gets ground, the handful of divots every garage collects get repaired, and then the system is built on top. Two days on site and it is done, with nobody having to move out of the house.
The owner who calls about one of these has usually just had enough of watching salt chew at the floor they bought with the house. Jimmy walks it, measures up and tells you what he found. If a repair needs pricing, you hear that number before anyone lifts a tool.
Cobra Epoxy and Flake Coatings, PA HIC 177204Winter on the 422 ends in March. What the salt did to bare concrete stays.
Detached garages and pole buildings by the river
The older river side properties are where a garage job gets interesting. Detached garages and outbuildings on those lots were poured whenever somebody needed one over the last hundred years, and each comes with its own history.
Never level to begin with
Plenty of these floors were out of level the day they were poured. Once ground, repaired and sealed, a flake finish hides a gentle wave well, so most of them coat fine as they sit.
Joints and old seams
Control joints and the lines where one pour meets another get cut and treated before the base coat, which on an old outbuilding can mean quite a few more of them than a newer garage has.
A bigger floor to grind
A wide pole building holds a lot more concrete than a two car bay. We measure it at the walkthrough so the schedule you are given matches the real size of the job.
When the concrete comes first
Once in a while the honest call is that a slab needs concrete work before any coating is worth the money.
Parking again, and booking in the cold months
You can walk across the new floor the evening the topcoat goes down. Boxes, shelving and the bins can move back in the following day. The car waits around three days. A warm tire parked on a system that has not fully hardened is how a brand new floor picks up marks, and that is the one wait we will ask you not to cut short.
People are often surprised that we coat garages right through the winter. A closed garage holds enough warmth for the system to cure, and on a slab that is properly cold we bring heat in. Outdoor work drops away once the weather turns, so the calendar usually has more room then, which suits anyone who wants the floor sealed before the worst of the salt arrives.
Everything that goes down is made in the USA, and the equipment we run is OSHA certified. We show up, finish on time, and get it right. On a garage, getting it right mostly means the car is back inside on the day we said it would be.
Send a few photos of the garage floor and Jimmy calls back within a business day.Two days of work. About three before the tires roll back on.
A short run down from the Boyertown shop
Douglassville is about nine miles from our shop, roughly fifteen minutes on the road, and well inside the fifty or so miles we cover. Garages in Birdsboro, Pottstown and Reading are part of the same working week for us.
Somewhere near the far edge of that and unsure whether we come out? Ask on the phone instead of guessing.
Questions
Before you book the garage
What Amity Township homeowners tend to ask first.
Does the coating stop salt damage or only cover it up?
It stops it. Salt damage starts when salty water soaks into the pores of bare concrete, freezes overnight and pushes the surface apart from inside. A sealed floor keeps that water sitting on top, where a squeegee or a hose can move it, so the slab underneath has nothing left to lose.
Can you coat a detached garage or an outbuilding?
Yes, and the older properties near the river have plenty of them. The walkthrough decides how. Most of those slabs coat well once they are ground and repaired, but where the concrete has real problems Jimmy will tell you it needs concrete work first, before a coating is worth your money.
Is winter a bad time to book a garage floor?
No. A garage counts as interior work, so January is as good a month as June for us. Shut the overhead door and the coating sets up fine, and a slab that feels like ice underfoot gets heaters brought in first. Plenty of people book then on purpose, so the floor is sealed before more salt comes in on the tires.
Do you have a referral program?
We do. Send a friend or a neighbor our way, and when they book a floor you both save. On a road full of newer houses with the same garage, one finished floor tends to get noticed, so mention who sent you the first time you call.
What happens at the walkthrough?
Jimmy looks over the condition of the slab, measures the garage and sets physical flake samples on the floor so you see them under your own light. You also hear what he found, including any repair and its number, before anything is agreed. It usually happens the same week you call.
What happens to the saw cut joints in the slab?
They are cut and treated before the base coat goes down. The grind covers the whole floor first, right up to the edges of every joint, so the system holds along those lines as firmly as it does across the open concrete. A newer two car garage usually has only a handful of them to work through.
Book a walkthrough
Have the slab sealed before salt season
Give us a rough size, say whether the garage is attached or out back, and mention anything that is on the floor now. A callback comes within a business day, and the walkthrough usually lands in that same week. No hidden fees, no surprises.
PA HIC 177204, American made products and a true lifetime warranty on residential interior floors. Call (484) 942-3219, email photos of the concrete to jfaust@cobraepoxy.com, or go through the contact page.
About your garage
A couple of lines gets it moving.
More Douglassville floors
If the house has a basement too, basement floor coating starts with a look at moisture. Blend choice and the build order sit on the flake epoxy flooring page, broken slabs get concrete crack repair, and shops or stores fall under commercial epoxy flooring. The wider write up is on our garage epoxy flooring page, finished floors are in the gallery, and the rest of our coverage lives on the Douglassville and Berks County pages.