Learn
Everything worth knowing before you coat a slab.
The coating is not the hard part. Mixing the coating and pulling it across a floor is a day’s work, and most people get it right the first time. What decides whether the floor is still there in ten years is the concrete underneath it, and every decision about that concrete gets made before a pail is opened.
These four pages cover those decisions, in the order you have to make them.
Start with the slab, not the color
Pick a finish whenever you like. It changes nothing about the work. The four questions that change the work are how big the floor is, whether the concrete is dry, whether anything is already on it, and how you are going to open the surface up so the primer can key into it.
Get those right and the installation is straightforward. Get one of them wrong and no amount of care with the roller recovers it, because the failure happens at the bond line, where you cannot see it and cannot reach it.
The one that catches most people
Moisture. A slab that looks dry, feels dry and has been dry underfoot for twenty years can still be moving water vapor up through itself. A cured coating is a continuous film laid straight over the top of that, and the film is what loses.
It is the most common reason a garage floor coating fails, and it is also the easiest one to rule out before you spend anything, because there is a test. Read that page first if you read only one.
The order of work
- Measure the floor, so you know what you are buying and roughly what it costs.
- Test for moisture. If this comes back wrong, nothing further matters until it is fixed.
- Find out what is on the slab. This decides how much preparation you are in for.
- Prepare the concrete — degrease, grind, repair, vacuum.
- Then coat. The step-by-step sequence lives in the installation hub.
Steps two and three can be done in either order, and both can be done today with things you already own. Neither of them requires you to have bought anything from us.
If your slab is not ready, we would rather you did not buy yet
A kit is four sealed chemical products and all sales are final. There is no version of this where a floor that fails becomes a return. That is why this section is written the way it is: the cheapest possible time to find a problem with your concrete is while the material is still on our shelf.
What the system is
ANVIL is a full-broadcast flake floor: a primer, a pigmented body coat, decorative flake broadcast into that base coat until the surface will not take any more, and a clear polyaspartic topcoat over the result. The system explains what each layer does, and technical data lists every published value with its source and its test method.
If you want to see it in your own garage before you read another word, upload a photo or order samples and put the real thing on your actual slab.
Not sure where your floor stands?
Tell us the size of the garage, the age of the slab and what is on it now, and we will tell you what the job actually involves — including if the answer is that your slab needs work first, or that this is not the right product for it.