Cape Breton Epoxy Flooring
Cape Breton Epoxy Flooring coats garage floors, basements, porches and shop floors across Sydney, Glace Bay, North Sydney and the rest of the island. Every slab is ground with diamond tooling, patched, primed and sealed.
Concrete takes a beating here. Salt comes off the road all winter and off the water all year. A coated floor keeps both out of the slab instead of letting them soak in.
Call +1 782-201-4554 and we will book a time to measure your floor and test the concrete. The written price we give you is the price you pay.
Send us the room and the rough size. We will arrange a visit and price it properly. Or call +1 782-201-4554.
We work on this island, not from an office across the causeway. When you call, you speak to the person who will be grinding your floor.
Every job starts with a moisture reading and a hardness check on the slab. Those two numbers decide which system goes down. Guessing is how coatings fail.
We grind. We do not acid etch. Diamond grinding opens the top of the concrete so the primer soaks in and locks on. Acid leaves a weak layer behind and the coating peels off it a year later.
Our quotes are written, itemised and fixed. If we find a soft patch or a wet spot once the grinder is running, we tell you before we carry on, not after.
Six systems, matched to the slab and to how the room actually gets used.
Flake epoxy flooring is the system most garages and basements on this island end up with. An epoxy base coat goes down, vinyl chips are broadcast into it while it is wet, and a clear top coat seals the lot.
View Flake Epoxy Flooring
A garage floor coating seals the slab so salt, brine and water stop soaking into it. On Cape Breton that is the difference between concrete that lasts and concrete that flakes apart near the door.
View Garage Floor Coating
Polyaspartic floor coating is a fast-curing resin that goes down in colder temperatures than epoxy and does not yellow in sunlight. On an island with a long cold season and a short good-weather window, that matters.
View Polyaspartic Floor Coating
Commercial epoxy flooring has to survive forklifts, wash-downs, dropped stock and inspection. It also has to go in without shutting a business down for a week.
View Commercial Epoxy Flooring
A coated basement floor turns a cold, dusty slab into a room you use. It seals the concrete, it stops the dust, and it does not trap moisture the way carpet and underlay do.
View Basement Floor Coating
Concrete floor coating covers everything a bare slab can be turned into: garage, basement, porch, patio, workshop, mechanical room or shop floor. Same principle every time, different system depending on what the floor meets.
View Concrete Floor CoatingSalt and brine sit on top of the coating instead of soaking into the slab, so the concrete underneath stops breaking down.
Damp air is a fact of life here. A sealed floor does not hold moisture the way bare concrete does, and it does not feed the musty smell in a closed-up basement.
Melt water, mud and grit wipe up with a flat mop. Nothing soaks in and nothing stains.
The surface is bright. A grey or blue flake floor throws light around a dark garage, which matters in December when it is dark by half four.
Flake broadcast gives the floor grip. Wet boots and dripping vehicles are less of a problem than they are on smooth sealed concrete.
Buyers notice a finished floor. A clean, sealed garage or basement reads as a maintained house, which counts for something in the Sydney market.
Half an hour on site tells us what your concrete needs. You get the moisture reading and a fixed price in writing.
Chloride is the problem. It comes from two places on Cape Breton: brine and rock salt off Highway 125 and the Trans-Canada, and salt carried inland on the wind off the Atlantic and Sydney harbour.
Chloride soaks into bare concrete and sits there. When the water in the slab freezes, it expands and pushes the surface apart from the inside. That is why the concrete near your garage door goes chalky and starts flaking off in coins.
Homes in Whitney Pier, North Sydney and Louisbourg get the worst of it because they take wind straight off open water. A sealed floor stops the chloride at the surface. You wash it off in spring instead of scraping loose concrete into a bucket.
A lot of housing across the CBRM went up during the coal and steel years, and plenty of those slabs are original. Sixty and seventy year old concrete is usually softer, more porous and patched in three or four places.
Old concrete can still take a coating. It often takes one better than new concrete, because it has finished curing and finished moving. What it needs is honest preparation: grind the whole surface, cut out anything crumbling, fill the low spots, then prime.
Newer builds around Coxheath, Sydney River and Howie Centre bring the opposite problem. Concrete under two months old still holds water and has to be tested before anything goes over it.
More than almost anywhere else we could be working. Fog rolls in off the Atlantic for weeks at a stretch and the humidity stays high well into autumn.
Moisture pushes up through a slab from the ground below. If it has nowhere to go and you seal the top, it collects under the coating and lifts it in blisters. The coating did not fail. The slab was wet.
We tape a plastic sheet to the concrete and read it, or use a meter on the surface, before quoting. On a slab that reads high we use a moisture-tolerant primer built for the job. It costs a little more, and it is the difference between a floor that lasts and a floor that bubbles by August.
Flake systems are an epoxy base, vinyl chips broadcast into it while wet, then a clear top coat. That is what most garages and basements on the island get. It hides trowel marks and old patching, and the chips give you grip.
Polyaspartic is a different resin. It cures fast, it does not yellow in sunlight, and it goes down in colder temperatures than epoxy will. We use it as a top coat over flake, and on its own where a floor has to be back in service the next morning.
Straight epoxy with no flake is a solid colour. It is the cheapest of the three and it suits a storage room, a mechanical room or a basement that nobody looks at twice.
We tell you which one fits your slab and how the room gets used. There is no upsell to the most expensive system if it buys you nothing.
Attached and detached garages, single bay through to four bay. Basements, finished and unfinished. Covered porches, sunrooms and back patios. Workshops, laundry rooms and mudrooms.
On the commercial side: warehouses off the Sydney Port Access Road, service bays, seafood processing floors, restaurant kitchens, retail floors and light manufacturing.
If the concrete is sound or can be repaired, it can be coated. If it is heaving in the middle, or cracked right through with movement on both sides, that gets fixed first or a coating is the wrong answer.
A properly prepared residential garage floor with a polyaspartic top coat runs fifteen to twenty years before it needs anything more than cleaning. Basements and porches, which never see a vehicle, go longer.
Commercial floors depend on traffic. A warehouse under forklifts will want a fresh top coat somewhere between eight and twelve years. The base system stays put and only the wear layer gets replaced, which is a fraction of the cost of starting over.
Failures almost always trace back to preparation rather than the product. A coating bonded to ground, clean, dry concrete stays put. A coating rolled over a sealed or dusty slab does not.
Grinding is most of the work. We run diamond tooling over every square inch of the slab, corners and edges included, until the surface is open and uniform. A vacuum shroud on the machine keeps the dust down.
Then the repairs. Cracks get cut into a V, cleaned and filled with a resin patch that ends up harder than the concrete around it. Pitted areas and spalled patches by the door get built back level.
Control joints are treated on purpose. We fill them so the floor cleans up as one surface, or leave them open where the slab needs room to move. On old CBRM slabs that decision matters.
Last comes primer, matched to the moisture reading. Only then does colour go down.
Grey flake blends are the most popular here and hide the most dirt. Blue, black and tan blends all come in a range of chip sizes. We can mix a custom blend if you want something specific.
Solid colours are available in the usual industrial range. Metallic finishes, which move and swirl under the top coat, suit basements and showrooms more than garages.
Gloss level is your call. Full gloss looks sharpest and shows more dust. Satin hides tyre marks and footprints better. We bring samples to the estimate so you can hold a chip against your own light.
We install through the winter and we are straight about the limits. Epoxy stops curing properly once the slab drops much below ten degrees, and the slab is colder than the air in an unheated garage.
Polyaspartic is the winter answer. It cures at temperatures where epoxy will not, and it holds its cure through a cold snap. In an unheated garage in February we heat the space, bring the slab up, and use a polyaspartic system start to finish.
Booking in October or April gets you better weather and more choice of dates. Booking in January is still possible.
Sweep or vacuum the grit. Sand and road salt tracked in off Kings Road or Grand Lake Road are abrasive, and grinding them under a tyre is the fastest way to dull any floor.
Wash with a flat mop, warm water and a squirt of dish soap. That is the whole routine. No wax, no polish, and nothing with citrus or ammonia in it.
After a nor'easter, push the melt water and slush out the door before it dries. Salt left to dry leaves a white film. It comes off with a damp mop and it is cosmetic, not damage.
A flake floor has texture built in. The chips sit slightly proud under the top coat and give the surface grip that smooth sealed concrete does not have.
Where a floor gets wet often, we add an aggregate to the top coat. It raises the slip resistance without turning the floor into something you cannot mop. Porches, entryways, ramps and commercial kitchens usually get it.
Any hard floor is slick with standing water on it. What matters is how it behaves with wet boots and a dripping vehicle on it, and that is what we build for.
Price comes down to square footage, the state of the slab and the system. A single bay garage in reasonable shape usually lands in the low four figures. A double is more. A slab that needs a lot of patching costs more than one that does not.
Rolling on a big box store kit costs a couple of hundred dollars. It also skips the grinding, which is why those floors peel in strips inside two winters. You then pay to have the old coating ground off before a real system can go down.
Call +1 782-201-4554 and we will measure, test the concrete and put a fixed written number in front of you. No charge, and no pressure to book on the spot.
We arrive, clear the floor and mask the walls, door tracks and anything staying in the room.
The grinder goes over the whole slab. Dust goes into the vacuum, not into the rest of the house.
Cracks, joints and spalled sections get cut out and filled, then ground flush once they set.
Primer goes down across the slab, followed by the base coat. Flake is broadcast into it while it is still wet.
The next day we scrape and vacuum the loose chip, then roll the clear top coat.
You walk on it after about a day and park on it after three. We take the masking with us.
Garages, basements, porches and commercial floors. Select any photo to open it larger.
Sydney, Sydney River, Glace Bay, North Sydney, Sydney Mines, New Waterford, Dominion and Louisbourg are our regular run. Whitney Pier, Membertou, Coxheath, Howie Centre and Mira Road are all inside it.
We also take work further out along Highway 105 toward Baddeck, down Highway 4 along the Bras d'Or, and across to Port Hawkesbury when the job is large enough to be worth the drive.
Not sure if we come out your way? Call +1 782-201-4554 and ask. If we cannot get to you we will say so on the phone rather than waste your time.
Brine off the road and salt off the water do not take a winter off. A ground, primed and sealed floor holds them out.
That is the main reason to coat one. Salt air drives chloride into open concrete and the freeze-thaw cycle then breaks the surface apart. A sealed floor keeps the chloride on top, where you can wash it off.
Yes, using a polyaspartic system and heat on the slab. Epoxy needs the concrete above about ten degrees to cure properly, so we do not use it in an unheated garage in January.
Probably not. Old concrete has stopped curing and stopped moving, which helps. We grind it back, cut out what is crumbling, rebuild the low spots and prime. A slab that is heaving or cracked right through needs different work first.
Light foot traffic after roughly 24 hours from the top coat. Vehicles after 72 hours. Rushing a vehicle back on soft coating leaves tyre prints that do not come out.
Yes. Warehouses, service bays, seafood and food processing floors, kitchens and retail. Commercial jobs are quoted after a site visit, because floor condition and shutdown windows change the price more than square footage does.
Tell us the room, the rough size and how it gets used, and we will come and price it. Prefer to talk it through? Call +1 782-201-4554.
