New builds & chalets
New Build & Chalet Garage Floors, Blue Mountains
Coat it before the first winter and you never fight salt damage. But not before the slab is 28 days old — and we will not.
A new slab is the best floor we ever coat and the easiest to get wrong, because the only thing standing between a perfect job and a failed one is patience.
The 28-day rule
Fresh concrete is releasing water for weeks. The conventional minimum before coating is 28 days, and in a cold shoulder-season pour it can want longer. Coat it early and the vapour still coming out of the slab collects under the film and lifts it — the failure looks exactly like a moisture problem, because it is one.
Builders and buyers push on this constantly, usually because the closing date and the ski season do not line up with the concrete. We will not coat inside 28 days. It is the one thing on this site we are inflexible about, because the failure is total and it is ours to redo.
Coat it before the first winter
Assuming the slab is old enough, doing this before the first season is straightforwardly the cheapest version of this job you will ever get. There is no salt damage to repair, no oil staining to chase, no twenty years of tire marks. The prep is a grind and a clean rather than a restoration, and the price reflects it.
The subdivisions going up around Collingwood and the chalets through Craigleith and the Blue Mountains are the obvious candidates — most of them are handed over with a bare slab that will spend its first February holding brine.
Rental and shared-ownership properties
A chalet garage that turns over weekly through ski season has a different brief: it needs to be cleanable in the twenty minutes between guests, it takes far more salt and grit than a family garage, and the install has to happen in a window when the property is empty. We schedule around booking calendars, and for short-term rental properties the shoulder weeks in late April and early November are usually the only realistic slots — worth booking well ahead, because everyone in the area wants the same two weeks.
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.