A lot of the new builds around the south and east edges of Collingwood handed over between March and May. If that is you, the slab in your garage passed the 28-day mark some weeks ago, and this is the best window it will ever be in.
Why a new slab is the easy one
Everything that makes this job expensive is absent.
There is no salt damage to grind back, because the floor has not seen a winter. There is no oil staining to chase out of the concrete. There are no twenty-year-old tire marks, no previous coating to strip, no patched sections from a previous owner, and — assuming the builder did it properly — there is an intact polyethylene vapour barrier underneath, which means the moisture test is very likely to come back well inside tolerance.
Preparation on a new slab is a diamond grind and a vacuum. That is it. The price sits at the bottom of the range because there is genuinely nothing to repair.
Compare that to a slab off one of the older streets near the harbour, forty winters in, pitted and sandy, needing a polymer overlay before a coating can even be discussed. Same finished floor, roughly half again the cost.
The 28-day rule, and why we will not bend it
Concrete does not stop being wet when it stops being soft. It continues releasing water for weeks after the pour. The conventional minimum before applying a coating is 28 days, and a cold shoulder-season pour can want considerably longer than that.
Coat it early and the vapour still leaving the slab collects at the bond line and lifts the coating off. It looks exactly like a moisture failure, because it is one — the water just came from the concrete itself rather than the ground under it.
We get pushed on this constantly, and almost always for the same reason: the closing date, the move-in and the ski season do not line up with the concrete. The answer is still no. It is the one thing on this site we are inflexible about, because the failure is total, it turns up a year later, and redoing it is on us.
If your slab went in this spring, that is long behind you. If it goes in this autumn, we are talking about next year.
Do it before the first February
The argument is not appearance, though the appearance is real.
From November your car comes home off Highway 26 carrying brine, and it melts off onto the floor and sits there. Bare concrete drinks it. The chloride works into the slab and starts on the reinforcing steel, and once that process has started, coating the floor later does not undo it — it only stops it getting worse.
A slab coated before its first winter never begins. That is the whole case, and it is why this is worth doing in year one rather than year five.
What to check before you call anyone
Two things worth knowing about your own floor:
Ask the builder when the slab was poured, not when you took possession. Those can be months apart, and it is the pour date that matters.
Look at the control joints. The saw-cut lines should be clean and straight. On a new slab they are doing their job — the concrete cracks where somebody chose. Any coating quote you get should say how they are being treated, because filling them rigid and coating over is the standard shortcut and the joint comes back through within a couple of seasons.
One last practical note for anyone in a new subdivision: builders often pour a run of garages in the same week, and neighbours frequently want the same work. Four floors on one street in one visit is a materially cheaper mobilisation than four separate trips, and we price it that way.