Resin Flooring

Both are resin systems and both give you a seamless floor, but they behave differently and the right choice depends on how the floor gets used.

Epoxy is hard, builds thickness well, bonds strongly and gives a high-build, hard-wearing surface. It is the usual choice for garages, workshops, storage and general commercial floors. Its weaknesses are that it is more brittle under sharp impact and it can chalk or yellow under prolonged direct UV, so it is not ideal for a floor in full sunlight all day.

Polyurethane is more flexible and more tolerant of temperature movement and thermal shock, and it holds its colour better under UV. It is the usual choice where a floor gets steam cleaned or washed down, where there are significant temperature swings, or where a little more give underfoot is wanted.

In a lot of domestic jobs, a garage in particular, epoxy is the sensible answer. We will tell you which we are proposing and why rather than just naming a product.

This is the thing to understand before you spend money on a resin floor. A concrete slab is not dry just because it looks dry. Ground moisture rises through concrete continuously, and if a slab has no working damp proof membrane underneath it, that moisture arrives at the surface. Put a sealed resin coating on top and the moisture has nowhere to go, so it builds pressure under the film and lifts it off in blisters and sheets. It usually looks fine for weeks or months first, which is what makes it so expensive to get wrong.

Older garages, outbuildings and slabs poured before modern DPM practice are the usual suspects, and it is common in exactly the sort of buildings people want to convert. It is not a reason to give up on a resin floor. It is a reason to test rather than assume, and to specify a moisture-tolerant primer or a damp-suppressant system where the readings call for it.

If a contractor quotes you for a resin floor in an old garage without ever mentioning moisture, that is worth asking about before you accept the price.

Resin does not bridge a moving crack. If there is live movement in the slab, whether from settlement, a joint, or a crack that opens and closes with temperature, that movement will reflect through a resin floor and show as a line, generally within the first year.

Static cracks, which is most of them, are a straightforward preparation item: opened out, cleaned, filled with a suitable resin repair mortar and made flush before the system goes down. Movement joints are different and need to be carried through the finished floor rather than covered over, so the joint stays a joint.

The assessment matters more than the repair here. Deciding whether a crack is dead or live is a judgement call made on site, and it changes the specification.

Resin bonds mechanically to concrete, which means it needs an open, sound, textured surface to key into. A power-floated slab is polished closed, and old floors carry curing compounds, sealers, oil, paint and general contamination. Rolling resin onto that gives you a floor that is bonded to the contamination rather than to the concrete.

So the slab is mechanically prepared, typically by diamond grinding or shot blasting, until it is clean, open and sound throughout. Then it is vacuumed properly, patched where needed, and primed. On a job like this the preparation is usually the largest part of both the time and the cost, and a quotation that is notably cheaper than the others is very often a quotation with less preparation in it.

A smooth gloss resin floor is slippery when it is wet. That is a straightforward property of the finish, not a defect, and it is why slip resistance has to be specified deliberately rather than hoped for.

It is achieved by broadcasting a fine aggregate, quartz or similar, into the wet coat and sealing over it, which gives a controlled texture. The trade-off is real and worth understanding: more texture means more grip and more effort to clean, less texture means an easier wipe-down and less grip underfoot when wet.

Where the floor gets wet, a wash-down area, an entrance, a workshop where you hose the floor, or anywhere the public walks, we would push you toward texture. For a dry domestic garage a smooth finish is usually fine.

There are two different questions here and they get confused constantly. Walk-on time is usually a matter of hours to overnight. Full chemical cure, meaning the floor has developed its final hardness and chemical resistance, typically takes around three to seven days depending on the system and the temperature.

That gap matters most for vehicles. Driving a car onto a resin floor before it has fully cured, and particularly turning the wheels while stationary, is a good way to mark a floor that would otherwise have been perfect. We will give you specific dates for foot traffic and for vehicles rather than a vague 'few days'.

Cold slows everything down. The same system in an unheated garage in January cures considerably more slowly than in July, and we plan around that rather than pretending otherwise.

Sometimes. Tiles, vinyl, adhesive residue, failed paint and old flaking coatings generally do have to be removed, because the resin can only be as sound as whatever it is stuck to. Sound bare concrete does not need removing, it needs preparing.

This is one of the bigger cost variables, so it is worth mentioning what is currently on the floor when you first get in touch, and a photograph is genuinely useful.