Service area · Craigleith
Floor Coatings in Craigleith
Small chalet bays on the shoreline strip, mostly unheated, taking more road salt per square foot than any floor we work on.
Everything about a coating here follows from the geography. Craigleith is a narrow band of housing squeezed between Highway 26 and the escarpment: the garages are small, the traffic is seasonal, and the brine arrives off a highway that gets salted hard all winter.
The brine load here is the highest we deal with
A chalet bay takes vehicles that have driven a salted highway to the hill and back, several times a weekend, for four months. The salt does not stay on the car. It melts off as brine, pools wherever the floor slopes, and soaks into the slab — and the pitting that shows up in the fourth or fifth winter is why most people on this strip call us in the first place.
Which has a practical consequence at quoting time. Along here we inspect for spalling before we discuss product at all, because a meaningful share of these floors need repair and resurfacing before anything goes on them.
Unheated, which narrows the shelf rather than the chemistry
Most bays here are unheated, so from October through to May the slab sits somewhere between about 0°C and 8°C. That does not rule out a coating, and it does not rule out either chemistry. It rules out most of the pails on the market. A product wanting 13°C or 21°C is finished for the season; Sikafloor-264 at a 3°C substrate minimum and Rust-Oleum's 9100 Winter Grade at 0–15°C are not, and neither are the low-temperature polyaspartic lines rated to about −1°C.
The other half of it is the dew point, which on this shoreline is often the binding constraint rather than the temperature. Data sheets ask for the substrate to sit at least 3°C above dew point and for humidity under 85%. A mild damp April morning off the water fails that test while a colder dry one passes it. So we take the reading on the day, and we do not promise a date we cannot read the weather for.
Garage floor coating in a Craigleith chalet, and when we can actually do it
The scheduling constraint is the one every trade has up here: occupied at weekends all season, let out in between. Midweek in the shoulder periods — late April and early November — is the realistic window. Be careful with the return-to-service promise you are given, though. Foot traffic is next day, but the data sheets put vehicles at 3 to 7 days, and a cold slab pushes that out further. If a rental has to take a car on the Friday, we need to start earlier in the week than the one-day-install advertising implies. See polyaspartic coatings.
Booking work in Craigleith
Tell us the size of the bay, roughly when the slab was poured, and whether the building is heated. That is usually enough for a realistic range over the phone — and enough for us to say if you are in the small group of floors where the honest answer is to fix the water before spending anything on a coating.