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. No salt damage to repair. No oil staining to chase. No twenty years of tyre marks. The prep is a grind and a clean rather than a restoration, and the price follows.
Which slabs around here are in that window right now
The subdivisions going up around Collingwood, and the chalets through Craigleith and the Blue Mountains. Almost all of them are handed over with a bare slab that will spend its first February holding brine — and once that first winter has happened, the cheap version of this job is gone for good.
Rental and shared-ownership properties
A chalet garage that turns over weekly through ski season is a different brief altogether:
- It has to be cleanable in the twenty minutes between guests, which puts the finish and the coving ahead of the colour.
- It takes far more salt and grit than a family garage, because a different car arrives every few days all season.
- The install has to land in a window when the property is genuinely empty, and that window is short.
We schedule around booking calendars. For short-term rentals the shoulder weeks in late April and early November are usually the only realistic slots, and everyone on the escarpment wants the same two weeks. Book well ahead and you get a choice of dates; ask in March and you get whatever is left.
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.