Before the coating
What does the prep involve?
Prep is the room getting cleared, the concrete getting ground open, the damage getting fixed, and the dust getting vacuumed off before anything goes down.
The short version
- The room comes out first. Nothing stays on the floor, and anything mounted low gets covered.
- The concrete is ground with a vacuum running on the machine, so the dust leaves the room instead of settling back onto the slab.
- Cracks, pop outs and low areas get repaired after the grinding, because grinding is what shows how far they go.
- The floor is vacuumed again after the repairs, and the edges and joints are done by hand.
- Clear View Surface Solutions publishes that the slab is diamond ground before anything goes down.
The order it happens in
The room comes out first. Cars, shelving, the freezer, whatever is stacked in the corner, all of it out, because the machine has to reach the wall and the floor has to be seen end to end. Anything mounted low gets covered, and so does the door track and the bottom of the drywall, since grinding throws dust at everything below knee height.
Then the concrete gets opened up. A grinder running diamond heads covers the whole floor while a vacuum pulls the dust off it, and the edges and corners get done with a smaller machine that reaches where the big one cannot. The slab changes color as it goes, which is how the person running it can see what has been covered and what has not.
What the grinding turns up
Grinding is also the inspection. A crack that looked like a hairline opens into something with depth. A patch somebody put in years ago either holds or comes loose under the head. A soft area shows up as a spot that grinds faster than the concrete around it. None of that is visible on a dirty floor, which is why the repairs get priced after the grinding rather than before it.
So the middle of the job is repair work. Cracks get chased out and filled, pop outs and spalled edges get rebuilt, and low areas get brought level. If the slab is going to be checked for moisture, that happens here too, on bare concrete with nothing on it.
Getting the dust off
Then the floor gets vacuumed, and it gets vacuumed more than once. Dust left in the profile sits between the concrete and the coating and becomes the bond, and dust is weaker than either of the two things it is standing between. The corners, the joints, the door track and the base of the walls get done by hand, because that is where it collects and that is where a coating usually lets go first.
Clear View Surface Solutions publishes that the slab is diamond ground before anything goes down, and that is the part of a quote worth reading closely. Two numbers on the same floor usually differ in the prep before they differ anywhere else, because prep is where most of the time goes. Putting the coating down is the short part of the job.