Garage Floor Coating in Collingwood

A two-car garage in Collingwood is between 400 and 600 square feet, and published 2026 ranges for coating one run $2,250 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 neither of them is the reason you will have read elsewhere.

First, a correction to what this industry tells you about cold

You will read everywhere that epoxy stops working in the cold and polyaspartic does not. We used to say a version of it on this page. It does not survive contact with the data sheets. Sikafloor-264, an epoxy, gives a minimum substrate temperature of 3°C. Rust-Oleum 9100 gives 0°C, and its Winter Grade is rated 0–15°C. Meanwhile Onyx Polyaspartic 87 wants 10°C, Citadel POLY100-SC wants 13°C, and Elite Crete SPARTIC-ALL MXP lists 21°C as its ideal. Several epoxies apply colder than most polyaspartics do.

So the minimum is a property of the product, not of the chemistry. "Polyaspartic works in the cold" is a category claim, and a category cannot have a working temperature — only a labelled pail can. Ask any installer which product they are putting down and what its sheet says. We put both on the quote.

Second, the reasons that do hold up here

The freeze-thaw cycle is real. Cured epoxy is hard and comparatively brittle, a slab here crosses 0°C repeatedly through the shoulder seasons, and polyaspartic tolerates that movement better. UV is real too: an aromatic epoxy ambers where the door light falls and a polyaspartic does not. Cure speed is real, though not at the numbers the category advertises — see below. Those three are why we still quote polyaspartic first on most bays. The cold is not one of them.

Epoxy is not a bad product. It costs less, it builds more film in one pass, and on a heated shop with a stable slab it is the better call. What decides it here is the slab reading on the day, the dew point, and which pail we can actually get.

What the day actually looks like

Foot traffic is next day. Vehicles are not, and this is the second place the category oversells itself: the data sheets for common polyaspartics give light traffic at 24 hours and vehicle traffic at 3 to 7 days, not the 24 hours you will see advertised. Cold pushes it further out. We will give you the number off the sheet for the product we are using, and it is a longer number than our competitors quote.

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. Parking on it before it has cured is how you cause it on a good floor.

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.