Epoxy Flooring near you

The first step is mechanical, not chemical. Diamond grinding or shot blasting removes the surface layer of the slab along with whatever is on it, and leaves a profile — a measurable roughness — for the resin to key into. Acid etching is the cheap substitute and it is the single most common reason a garage floor coating peels; it does not reliably remove curing compounds or sealers and it can leave residue behind.

Then the repairs. Cracks are cut out and filled with a resin or a repair mortar rather than skimmed over, control joints are decided on — filled hard, filled flexibly or reflected through the finish — and spalled or pitted areas are rebuilt. What you decide about joints matters because a joint that is bridged rigidly will crack the coating above it when the slab moves, and a joint left open collects grit.

Finally, testing. Moisture in the slab is the second great killer of epoxy floors, because resin is a vapour barrier and moisture rising through the slab will push it off. A ground-floor slab is meant to sit on a polyethylene vapour barrier of 0.2 mm nominal thickness, lapped at least 200 mm and sealed at penetrations, but older slabs are unreliable on that point. Ask for a moisture test to the resin manufacturer's method, and for a stated plan — a moisture-tolerant primer, a different system, or waiting — if the reading is high.

Concrete contains crystalline silica, and grinding it produces respirable dust. SafeWork NSW describes crystalline silica as a natural mineral found in products such as sand, concrete and granite, lists concrete and bricks among the materials containing it, and states a workplace exposure standard for respirable crystalline silica of 0.05 mg per cubic metre averaged over eight hours. Cutting, sanding and drilling are the activities named as producing the fine dust.

From 1 September 2024 the rules tightened nationally. In New South Wales the Work Health and Safety Amendment (Crystalline Silica Substances) Regulation 2024 amended the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2017 to provide for stronger regulation of the processing of materials containing crystalline silica across all industries, particularly where the processing is assessed as high risk. For high-risk processing the duties include instruction, information and training for workers about the health risks, a silica risk control plan developed from the risk assessment, air monitoring with results provided to the regulator, and health monitoring for workers.

For a homeowner, that translates into questions rather than obligations. Ask how the slab will be ground, whether the machines run on-tool extraction or water suppression, whether the contractor has done a risk assessment for the processing, and what the plan is for keeping dust out of the rest of the house. A contractor who cannot describe their dust control has almost certainly not done the assessment, and the same shortcut usually shows up in the preparation quality.

Queensland names this work explicitly. The scope of the QBCC's floor finishing and covering (hard sector) licence class includes preparing, applying and finishing epoxy and seamless floor coverings, alongside the timber flooring work in the same class. So in Queensland the contractor laying your garage epoxy and the contractor sanding your hallway boards are licensed under the same class, which is a useful thing to know when you are checking a licence number against the work being quoted.

Elsewhere the picture varies. Service NSW's licence check covers residential building work as well as the occupational trades, and the other states and territories each set their own thresholds and classes through their own regulator. The habit that works everywhere is the same: get the licence number, check it against the register yourself, and ask the contractor to name the class and say what it authorises.

Two things sit outside licensing and still matter. Public liability insurance is worth confirming for work that involves grinders, dust and solvents in an attached garage. And if the epoxy is going into a wet area rather than a garage, waterproofing is a separate licensed trade in Queensland and a separate discipline everywhere — a resin coating is not a waterproof membrane and should never be quoted as one.

Because preparation is invisible once the floor is down, it is the part that disappears from cheap quotes. Write it in. Name the preparation method — diamond grinding or shot blasting, not acid etching — the crack and joint treatment, the moisture test method and what happens if it fails, the primer, the number of coats and the film build, whether an anti-slip aggregate is included and where, and the cure times before foot traffic and before a car goes back in.

Set expectations on appearance too. A resin floor is a hand-applied finish over an existing slab, so it will follow the slab's falls and its larger undulations, and a metallic or flake finish is deliberately variable. Agreeing in advance what counts as an acceptable variation, ideally against a sample panel made on your own slab, prevents the argument that otherwise happens at handover.

The Australian Consumer Law guarantees apply whatever the contract says: acceptable care and skill, fitness for any stated purpose, and delivery in a reasonable time. Keep the quote, the product data sheets and any photographs of the prepared slab before coating, because a photograph of a properly profiled slab is the single most useful piece of evidence in a bond-failure dispute. LokalMatch is the place to line several quotes up and see which ones have priced the preparation honestly.