Reading’s basements, garages and shop floors
A city of pre war brick with deep old basements and small rear garages. Different concrete to the townships, and a different conversation.
Reading, Berks County
What Reading concrete is like
Reading is the county seat and the oldest concrete on our patch. Most of the housing inside the city is pre war brick rowhome and twin, which means basements that were dug and poured a very long time ago, usually thin, usually without anything resembling a vapor barrier underneath, and often with a floor drain that has been there longer than anyone living in the house.
That makes a Reading basement a moisture conversation before it is a color conversation. We test the slab rather than guessing, because vapor pushing up through an old city floor is exactly what lifts a coating off in sheets eighteen months later. Where the reading calls for it a moisture tolerant primer goes down first, and on the rare slab where the number is genuinely bad we will say so.
Garages in the city are their own thing. A lot of them are detached, sitting off an alley behind the house, narrow, and poured at a different time to anything else on the property. They are often the most rewarding jobs we do, because a coated floor turns a dark brick box into usable space, and the flake hides the unevenness of a slab that was never going to be flat.
One more thing worth saying about city work. Access is genuinely harder here than in a township, because the grinders, the extraction and the material have to get from a van parked on a street into a basement down a narrow set of stairs, or into a garage off an alley that a truck cannot enter. We are used to it and it is built into the way we quote, but it is one of the reasons a Reading job and a Blandon job of the same square footage are not the same job.
The person who quoted your job is the person holding the grinder.
Cobra Epoxy, Boyertown PAServices here
What we get asked for in Reading
Everything we do is available in Reading. These three come up the most, and the full list is here.
Basement Epoxy Flooring
The cheapest square footage in the house, once the slab stops being bare concrete.
Garage Epoxy Flooring
The floor that takes the most abuse in the house, finally protected from road salt and hot tires.
Commercial Epoxy Flooring
Specified for pallet jacks and constant traffic rather than scaled up from a house.
Nearby in Berks County: Douglassville·Blandon·Bechtelsville·Birdsboro·Fleetwood·Kutztown·Wyomissing·Oley·Bally·Hamburg
Prep is the whole job
Almost every coating failure this trade produces traces back to preparation. A slab that was acid etched or pressure washed instead of mechanically ground never gave the coating a profile to key into, so the film is held on by surface tension and nothing else. One winter of road salt and a hot tire takes it off in sheets.
So we grind. Diamond grinders with dust extraction, down to clean open concrete, every time and on every job. Then the repairs, because coating over a crack just prints its shape through the finish and it opens again anyway. Only then does the first coat go down.
That is the part customers in this area keep writing reviews about, and it is the reason residential interior floors carry a true lifetime warranty. We are not going to shortcut the stage that decides whether we get a phone call in three years.
Road salt is doing more than making a mess
Salt gets treated as a housekeeping problem. It is doing considerably more than that. Salt water freezes at a lower temperature, so it stays liquid longer and travels further into a slab before it freezes, which means it does its damage deeper inside the concrete rather than at the surface.
It also attacks chemically, working on the cement paste that holds the aggregate together. That is why the concrete around a garage door opening, which takes the heaviest salt exposure of anything on a property, is almost always the first part to break up.
Every car picks it up off the road from the first gritting run and drips it onto the same patch of garage floor overnight for four months. Sealing the floor is the only part of that chain a homeowner actually controls.
On the map
Reading is 18 miles from the shop
We are based in Boyertown and run roughly fifty miles out, so Reading is comfortably inside the normal working radius. Local reference points around here include the Pagoda on Mount Penn, Penn Street and the Route 422 bypass.
Nearby towns we also cover include Wyomissing, Birdsboro, Blandon. If you are on the edge of that and not sure, call and ask rather than assuming. It costs nothing to find out.
Questions
Questions from Reading
What people here tend to ask before they book a walkthrough.
Can you test before I commit to anything?
Yes, and on any basement or older slab we do it as part of the walkthrough rather than after you have agreed to the work. It is the one measurement that can change the answer from yes to not yet, so taking it early is in everybody interest.
What is your service area?
Four counties. All of Berks, a large piece of Montgomery, the northern half of Chester and the southern boroughs of Lehigh, which works out at roughly fifty miles from the shop in Boyertown. The service areas page lists every town we have written up, though plenty of jobs happen in places that are not on that list.
My concrete is in rough shape. Is it too far gone?
Almost certainly not. Surface damage, pitting, spalling and cracking are all normal repair work and they get sorted as part of the job. The one case where we will tell you to stop is structural movement, a slab that has heaved or dropped at a corner, because a coating sits on top of that problem rather than solving it.
How many days does a garage floor take?
Two on site for a normal single or double bay. The grinding, repairs and base coat with the flake broadcast all happen on the first day, and the scrape back and topcoat on the second. After that it is light foot traffic the same evening and vehicles at about the three day mark.
What is the cleaning routine?
Sweep or dust mop it, and wash it with warm water and a neutral cleaner when it needs it. In a garage a hose does the job. What you should not use is anything acidic, any wax and any polish, because those either attack the finish or sit on top of it dulling the look you paid for.
What happens if something goes wrong later?
You call and we come out. Residential interior floors are covered for life against the system losing bond, and being twenty minutes up the road rather than a franchise head office three states away is what makes that worth anything. One customer had flaws caused by other trades on his house and we fixed those too, which was not covered by anything.
Is there anything off for service workers?
There is. Military, police, fire and hospital staff all get a discount, and it has been in place since Cobra started rather than being a seasonal offer. Mention it when you call, because it is applied by hand rather than automatically.
I want the same floor my neighbor has. Is that possible?
Most of the time, and it happens more often than you would think. If we laid it, we know the blend. If somebody else did, bring a photo and we will get close. The caveat is light. The same chip in a north facing garage and a south facing one genuinely does not look the same.
Book a walkthrough
Book a walkthrough in Reading
Tell us the room, the rough size and what the concrete looks like now. Jimmy calls back within a business day to arrange a look at it.
Made in the USA materials, OSHA certified equipment and dust extraction throughout. Residential interiors carry a true lifetime warranty. PA HIC 177204.
Prefer the phone? (484) 942-3219 reaches Jimmy directly, or email jfaust@cobraepoxy.com with a photo of the slab. The contact page has the same form with a bit more room.
Tell us about the floor
Send it across and Jimmy will be in touch inside a business day to arrange a look at the floor.
Reading sits in Berks County, one of four counties on our patch. See the full service area, browse what we coat, look through the gallery, or get in touch.