Repair & resurfacing
Concrete Repair & Resurfacing, Collingwood
Salt-spalled and pitted slabs brought back to a coatable surface — or an honest answer that it is past that.
Most of the badly damaged garage slabs in this area are damaged by the same thing, and it is not age. It is chloride.
What salt actually does to a slab
Road salt melts off the vehicle onto the floor as brine. Concrete is porous, so it soaks in. Two things then happen. Chloride reaching the reinforcing steel corrodes it, and rust occupies more volume than steel did, so it pushes the concrete above it off — that is spalling, and it works from the inside out. Separately, the brine raises the number of freeze-thaw cycles the surface goes through, and each cycle the trapped moisture expands and takes a little more of the surface with it.
The result is the pitted, sandy, crumbling surface you see on a lot of twenty- and thirty-year-old garage floors between here and Wasaga. It is not cosmetic. It is the slab losing section.
What can and cannot be brought back
| Condition | Realistic answer |
|---|---|
| Surface pitting, sound underneath | Grind and fill, then coat. Good outcome, normal cost. |
| Widespread shallow spalling | Polymer-modified overlay to re-establish a flat surface, then coat. |
| Deep spalling to exposed rebar | Cut out and patch structurally first. Sometimes worth it, sometimes not. |
| Slab cracked and differentially settled | Coating will not fix movement. Address the base or accept the crack. |
| Crumbling through the section | Replace the slab. We will say so rather than sell an overlay that fails. |
The last row is the one worth stating plainly. A resurfacing product bonded to concrete that is failing underneath fails with it, and you will have spent several thousand dollars finding that out. If your slab is at that stage we would rather lose the job and tell you.
Talk to a Collingwood floor coating contractor
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.