Garage floors
Garage Floor Coating in Collingwood
The core job. One-day polyaspartic in a two-car bay, installed in weather that would stop an epoxy crew for the season.
A two-car garage in Collingwood is between 400 and 600 square feet, and a full flake system on one runs roughly $4,000 to $7,500 depending on the state of the slab underneath. That is the honest range. Anyone quoting you a firm number over the phone without knowing whether your slab holds moisture is quoting the coating, not the job.
Why we quote polyaspartic first here
Two reasons, and both are about this climate rather than about margin.
The first is temperature. Standard epoxy needs a slab at roughly 10°C and rising to cure properly, and it wants that for most of a day. In an unheated Collingwood garage the slab sits below that from about mid-October to early May — it lags air temperature badly because it is a large thermal mass sitting on frozen ground. Polyaspartic cures far colder and far faster. That is the difference between a floor you can book in February and a floor you wait until June for.
The second is the freeze-thaw cycle. Cured epoxy is hard and comparatively brittle. A slab here crosses 0°C repeatedly through the shoulder seasons and moves as it does. Polyaspartic stays more flexible and tolerates that movement better, and it holds up under UV where an epoxy will amber if any part of the floor sees daylight through an open door.
Epoxy is not a bad product. It is a good product for a heated shop with a stable slab, and it costs less. It is the wrong default for an unheated bay on the Georgian Bay snowbelt, and it gets specified here constantly because the page selling it was written for somewhere else.
What the day actually looks like
| Step | What happens | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Moisture test | Calcium chloride or in-slab RH probe, read before we quote | A slab pushing vapour will delaminate any coating. This is the test most quotes skip. |
| Diamond grinding | Mechanical profile to CSP 2–3, dust collected at the tool | Acid etching does not open a power-trowelled slab. Grinding is why coatings stay on. |
| Crack & pit repair | Rout out, fill with polyurea, re-grind flush | Control joints get treated, not buried — a buried joint telegraphs through and splits. |
| Base coat | Pigmented polyaspartic, rolled | Cures in roughly 1–2 hours at Collingwood shoulder-season temperatures. |
| Flake broadcast | Vinyl chip thrown to full rejection, scraped back next day | Full rejection, not a light scatter — this is where cheap jobs are cheap. |
| Top coat | Clear polyaspartic with an anti-slip additive | Wet-floor slip resistance matters far more here than in a dry climate. |
Walk on it that evening, park on it in 24 to 48 hours. Hot tire pickup — the failure where a warm tire lifts the coating off the slab — is a problem for peel-and-stick products and thin roll-on kits, not for a ground and properly bonded polyaspartic.
The salt question
This is the thing a Collingwood garage floor is actually up against. From November through March your car arrives home carrying brine off Highway 26 and the county roads, and it melts off into a puddle under the vehicle. Bare concrete drinks that. The chloride works into the slab, and where it reaches the reinforcing steel it corrodes it and spalls the surface off from underneath. That is the pitting and flaking you see on twenty-year-old garage floors all over this area.
A continuous coating stops the brine reaching the concrete at all. That is the actual argument for doing this — the appearance is real but secondary, and we would rather sell it on the part that saves the slab.
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.