The questions worth asking a floor contractor.

The owner. Every floor is installed by the owner of the business rather than a dispatched crew, which means the person who quotes the job is the person who grinds the slab and the person who answers the phone afterward.

It also means only one floor gets installed at a time. That is a real constraint, not a sales tactic.

No. This is a mobile service with no showroom.

Estimates happen at your property, on the slab being coated. That is more useful than a sample board in a storefront, because the condition of your concrete — not the color you pick — is most of the quote.

Yes.

A coating almost never fails because of the coating. It fails because of what is underneath it.

New Jersey is unusually hard on a garage slab. Road salt and calcium chloride ride in on your tires from November through March. Freeze-thaw cycles drive moisture up through concrete that was poured without a vapor barrier. And a hot tire pulled in on an August afternoon will lift a coating that was only ever bonded to the sealed top surface of the slab.

That is what happens to the kit from the big-box store. It gets rolled onto concrete that was rinsed with an acid etch — which cleans the slab but does not open it. There is nothing for the resin to key into. It looks correct for one season and lets go in the second.

The fix is not a better product. It is mechanical preparation.

Four steps, in this order, on every floor.

Grind with 30-grit diamonds. The slab gets ground — not acid-etched — to scratch the surface open so the epoxy has something to adhere to.

Vacuum out all the debris. Grinding leaves dust sitting in the profile that was just opened. Resin bonds to concrete, not to what is lying on top of it.

Patch every crack. Filled rather than coated over, so they do not telegraph back through the finished floor the first time the slab moves.

Lay a vapor barrier. To prevent moisture coming up from the ground and ruining the floor over time. Vapor driving up through a slab is the one condition that defeats any coating, and it is the step most one-truck operations leave out.

Two: flake and metallic. Those are the only two finishes we do.

Flake is decorative vinyl flake broadcast over the base coat — textured, and good at hiding the everyday dirt a garage collects. Metallic has metallic pigment worked through the resin while it’s still wet, so no two floors come out identical.

Floors are finished with a polyaspartic topcoat to protect against scratches, nicks, and everyday wear and tear.

Flake floors start at $6.75 per square foot. Metallic floors start at $8.50 per square foot.

A typical two-car garage is about 400 square feet, so a flake floor starts at around $2,700 and a metallic floor at around $3,400. Your actual quote depends on the size and condition of your slab. Call or text (908) 812-3925 for a real number.

No. Flake and metallic are the only two finishes we do.

If your space needs polished concrete, a quartz broadcast system, or urethane cement — which commercial kitchens and breweries usually do — it’s not work we take on. Better to tell you that here than to sell you the wrong floor.

Typically three days.

Yes. Everything needs to be removed from the garage before the work starts, so the whole slab can be ground, patched and coated.