Garage, basement and commercial floors opened with a diamond grinder, moisture tested in writing, and built to the thickness the quote names.
Downers Grove Epoxy Flooring has spent more than 20 years putting down epoxy flooring in Downers Grove, IL and the surrounding DuPage and west Cook suburbs, from two-car garage floors and finished basements to polished concrete, metallic epoxy, and commercial and industrial floor coatings. Every job starts the same way: we look at the slab, test it, and grind it open before any coating is mixed.
That order matters because most failed floors we are called to fix were never prepared at all. A coating rolled onto a dusty, acid-washed or damp slab can look perfect for a season and then peel under a hot tire or lift in sheets where vapor pushes up from below. Our quotes name the product line, the number of coats and the finished thickness, so you can hold the finished floor up against the paper.
We coat garages that take a winter of brine and rock salt, basements built over damp mid-century slabs, and clinic, kitchen, office and warehouse floors that have to reopen on schedule. The sections below walk through how each of those jobs runs and what we check before we start.
What we do
Ground, tested and coated epoxy floors for Downers Grove garages, basements and businesses
Ground, moisture-tested epoxy garage floors with flake or quartz broadcast and a polyaspartic topcoat built for salt-season driving.
Diamond-ground, densified polished concrete for showrooms, offices, warehouses and modern homes, with test passes before the grind is set.
Fast-curing, UV-stable polyaspartic floor coatings for garages, showrooms, clinics and kitchens that need to reopen quickly and hold their color.
Moisture-tested basement floor epoxy for laundry rooms, workshops, gyms and finished basements, with primers chosen for damp mid-century slabs.
Marbled, hand-worked metallic epoxy floors for basements, showrooms, garages and offices, installed over ground and moisture-tested concrete.
Diamond grinding and shot blasting that removes old coatings, mastic and weak concrete and leaves a measured profile for coatings to grip.
Crack, spall, joint and salt-damage repair for garage, basement and commercial slabs, done right before a coating or polish goes down.
Seamless commercial epoxy floors for clinics, offices, retail, gyms and light industry, scheduled around your hours and built to your cleaning routine.
Static-dissipative and conductive epoxy floors for electronics assembly, labs, imaging and data rooms, installed and tested to ANSI/ESD criteria.
Full-broadcast vinyl flake epoxy floors for garages, basements, shops and commercial spaces, with chip size and blend chosen on your own slab.
Thick industrial epoxy and urethane cement floors for warehouses, manufacturing and maintenance shops, sized to forklift traffic and chemicals.
Seamless urethane cement kitchen floors with integral cove bases for restaurants, bakeries and food stores, installed around service hours.
Our crew has been grinding and coating concrete for more than two decades, which means we have seen what a Chicago-area winter does to a floor that was coated the wrong way. That history shapes the way we scope every job, starting with the slab rather than the color chart, and it is why our written proposals spell out preparation as carefully as they spell out the finish.
Every slab is opened with a diamond grinder or a shot blaster to a measured ICRI concrete surface profile, so the epoxy has real texture to bite into rather than the shallow, uneven etch a bottle of acid leaves behind. That profile is what keeps a garage floor from flaking at the tire lines after its first winter.
No price is final until a moisture test is in the written scope, whether the slab is in a garage or a basement. Downers Grove houses sit on everything from 1950s basement floors to new pours, so we test for the vapor that lifts coatings rather than assuming a dry slab and letting the warranty exclusion find it later.
Garage systems are chosen for the calcium chloride and rock salt that ride in on tires from December to March in DuPage County, so the topcoat resists the chemical and the broadcast hides the grit. A thin, single-coat floor sold on looks alone tends to dull and soften under that load rather than shrugging it off.
When a Downers Grove garage slab is being replaced, we point to the village rules first: the local building code amendment deletes the model-code exception that lets a garage slab skip its vapor retarder. Knowing that before a pour is quoted keeps a new floor coatable rather than trapping moisture under the epoxy from day one.
Grinding dust is pulled into a vacuum at the machine and bagged, never rinsed toward a floor drain or a storm inlet. That keeps fine concrete dust out of an attached house and out of St. Joseph Creek rather than washing it down the driveway the way a wet-grind crew sometimes does.
Before a job is sold, we explain what a coating warranty leaves out, and moisture vapor and hydrostatic pressure are the first exclusions we name. You learn the limits of the paper while you can still choose a moisture-mitigation primer, rather than after a blister appears.
A garage job starts with a slab check, a moisture test and a written scope, then moves to grinding, crack and spall repair, the base coat, the broadcast and the topcoat. We tell you when you can walk on it and when you can park on it before we start, so the car has somewhere to go for the right number of nights.
An attached garage shares a wall and often a door with the living space, so dust and coating odor are the two things homeowners ask about most. We grind with vacuum capture at the machine, seal the house door, and choose low-odor systems inside the Illinois VOC limits so the kitchen does not smell like a paint store.
A detached garage usually sits unheated through the winter, so its slab swings through freeze and thaw and stays cold long into spring. We coat these with systems that tolerate that cycling, and we schedule them for the months when the slab itself is warm enough to cure the epoxy properly.
Downers Grove amends the 2021 International Residential Code to delete the R506.2.3 exception that elsewhere lets a garage slab go without an under-slab vapor retarder. A new garage floor poured in the village should sit over a vapor retarder meeting ASTM E1745, while a slab poured decades ago may have nothing under it, which changes what we test for and what we recommend.
We start with an ASTM D4263 plastic sheet test and step up to ASTM F1869 calcium chloride or ASTM F2170 in-situ relative humidity probes when a slab looks damp or the system calls for numbers. The readings are compared against the thresholds in ASTM F710, and they decide whether the floor needs a moisture-tolerant primer before the epoxy goes down.
Cracks, spalls and pitting are mapped and repaired with a rigid filler or a flexible joint material before coating, depending on whether the crack is still moving. When a slab has heaved, settled or crumbled past patching, we tell you plainly that it needs replacement rather than a coating that will crack along with it.
Rock salt and calcium chloride brine soak into bare concrete, recrystallize as the slab dries, and push off flakes of the surface over a few winters. A coated floor keeps that brine on top where it can be rinsed off, which is the cheapest protection a DuPage County garage slab can get.
Epoxy cures by chemical reaction, and that reaction slows sharply on a cold slab and stalls when the surface sits near the dew point. We read slab temperature and the dew point spread at the surface before we coat, and an unheated garage in deep winter is told to wait for spring rather than risk a soft, cloudy floor.
A tire coming off a warm highway softens a thin coating and peels it up as it cools and grips, which is called hot tire pickup. Thick, 100% solids epoxy with a polyaspartic topcoat resists it, while thin water-based paint sold as epoxy tends to lift in exactly the shape of your tires.
A store kit relies on acid etching and a thin, water-based film, so it builds a fraction of the thickness of a ground, multi-coat professional system. We build the floor in layers over a diamond-ground profile, which is the difference between a coating that lasts years and one that is peeling by the second spring.
Published Chicagoland ranges for concrete coatings run roughly $3 to $15 per square foot, and the floor you have decides where yours falls. Crack and spall repair, removal of an old coating, moisture mitigation, the flake or quartz broadcast and the topcoat are all line items, and our quote lists each one so two bids can be compared fairly.
A basement slab sits against damp soil on every side, so the first question on any basement coating is how much moisture is coming through it. We test before we price, and the answer decides whether a standard epoxy will hold or whether a moisture-mitigation primer has to go down first.
Much of the housing around Downers Grove dates from 1950 to 1979, and those basement floors often carry layers of paint, patching compound and black mastic from old tile. We grind all of it off down to sound concrete, because a new coating is only as strong as the weakest layer underneath it.
Sump pits, perimeter drain tile and floor drains are where water meets the slab, so the coating has to stop cleanly at each one. We detail the edges around the basin and the drain grate and keep both serviceable, rather than sealing a sump lid shut under a layer of epoxy.
If a basement has ever taken a sewer backup, the plumbing fix should come before the floor, because installing an overhead sewer or backflow device often means cutting the slab. The Downers Grove Sanitary District runs a reimbursement program for those devices, and finishing that work first keeps a new epoxy floor from being trenched a year later.
After a flood or a backup, the slab has to be cleaned, disinfected and dried out before anything is coated, and drying a basement slab takes longer than drying the air above it. We test the slab after cleanup rather than going by how the room feels, so a coating is not sealed over trapped water.
The white, chalky powder that appears on some basement slabs is efflorescence, salt left behind as water moves up through the concrete and evaporates. It tells us moisture is active in that slab, so we treat it as a test result, grind the salts away and plan a primer that can handle the vapor.
When testing shows vapor above what a standard epoxy tolerates, a moisture-mitigation primer goes down first to slow that vapor and give the coating a stable base. It adds a line to the quote, and it is far cheaper than a blistered floor and a warranty claim that the moisture exclusion denies.
A laundry room needs a floor that shrugs off detergent and water, a workshop needs one that takes dropped tools and oil, and a home gym needs grip under rubber mats and bare feet. We pick the broadcast and topcoat for the use, so the same basement can carry different textures in different rooms.
Nearly every coating warranty excludes failures caused by moisture vapor transmission and hydrostatic pressure under the slab. We explain those exclusions before the job is sold and show you the test results behind our recommendation, so the limits of the warranty are not a surprise after the fact.
A floor coating is never sold as radon reduction, because in Illinois radon mitigation is licensed work under IEMA. A coating also does not waterproof a leaking basement, so we send those problems to the right trade and coat the floor once the water and air are handled.
A vinyl flake broadcast is thrown into the wet base coat, then scraped and sealed under a clear topcoat. Smaller chips give a fine, granite-like look and larger chips read bolder, while a full broadcast hides dust, tire marks and minor slab imperfections better than a partial scatter.
Metallic epoxy uses pearlescent pigments that are worked by hand while the coating is wet, so every floor swirls differently. It needs a flawless ground base, steady temperatures and an experienced installer, because the same pigments that make the look also show every roller mark from a rushed job.
Polished concrete is the slab itself, ground in passes with finer and finer diamonds and hardened with a lithium silicate densifier. The depth of the first grind decides whether you see cream, a salt-and-pepper finish or broad, exposed stone, and we show you test passes before committing to one.
High gloss looks sharp but shows dust, scratches and tire marks, while satin and matte topcoats hide everyday wear and read calmer under bright light. We help you pick the sheen by what the room actually sees, which is usually satin in a working garage.
A quartz broadcast embeds colored sand into the coating, giving both color and a built-in slip-resistant texture in one step. It is the system we reach for on ramps, entries, commercial kitchens and anywhere wet footing is a concern.
A solid color coating with no broadcast is the right call for a workshop, a mechanical room or a floor that will be striped for safety lanes. It cleans easily and shows spills quickly, and we add a fine aggregate to the topcoat when it needs grip.
Standard epoxy yellows, or ambers, when sunlight hits it through an open garage door or a south-facing window. Where the floor sees daylight, we specify a UV-stable polyaspartic or polyurea topcoat so the color you choose stays the color you have.
Saw-cut lines can be scored into the slab to create tile patterns or borders before coating, and stencils let us set a logo or a color band into the floor. These details work best on a showroom, a lobby or a garage that doubles as a display space.
A commercial floor carries more traffic, stricter cleaning, and often a building code or health department requirement a home floor never sees. The schedule is also tighter, so commercial jobs get a phasing plan and a cure timeline built around the business, not just the coating.
Clinic floors are wiped with hospital-grade disinfectants every day, which dulls and softens some topcoats. We specify chemical-resistant systems with tight, seamless surfaces so cleaning crews can disinfect without the floor breaking down at the seams.
Veterinary exam rooms and treatment areas see claws, urine, disinfectants and constant washing. We install seamless, slip-resistant coatings with integral cove bases so fluids stay on the floor surface and out of the wall cavity.
Office campus mechanical rooms need floors that hold up to oil and equipment, loading docks need impact and abrasion resistance, and data rooms may call for static-dissipative or ESD flooring held within a set resistance range. Each gets a system matched to the job rather than one coating everywhere.
Commercial kitchens in DuPage County go through health department plan review, which asks for a commercial-grade, nonabsorbent floor with a coved base at a 3/8-inch radius and rules out sheet vinyl. The FDA Food Code covers coved floor and wall junctures, and we build kitchen floors with integral cove bases to meet both.
Urethane cement handles hot water washdowns, grease and harsh cleaners that would soften an ordinary epoxy. We use it in kitchens, bakeries and food-production rooms where the floor sees thermal shock every day, especially near dish areas and grease interceptors.
Gym floors take dropped weights, rolling equipment and daily cleaning, so they need impact resistance and a texture that grips under sweat. We build thicker systems in weight areas and choose topcoats that stand up to the disinfectants gyms use between sessions.
Light manufacturing and warehouse floors carry forklift and pallet jack wheel loads that grind a thin coating to the concrete in the travel lanes. We specify industrial epoxy at a thickness matched to the traffic, with safety striping and aisle markings coated in.
Downers Grove sits in the Chicago 2015 ozone nonattainment area, and 35 Ill. Adm. Code Part 223 sets VOC limits for floor and industrial maintenance coatings alongside the national 40 CFR 59 rule. Those limits bind the person applying the product, so we choose compliant systems rather than leaving the question to the customer.
Businesses that cannot close get overnight and weekend windows, with fast-curing polyaspartic or urethane cement systems that can reopen by morning. We phase large floors in sections so part of a clinic, office or showroom stays in use while the rest cures.
Downers Grove Epoxy Flooring provides epoxy-flooring throughout the greater Downers Grove area, with the same crews and the same standards on every job.
Good to know
Published Chicagoland ranges for concrete coatings run roughly $3 to $15 per square foot, and the spread is real. Slab condition, crack and spall repair, the coating system, the broadcast and the topcoat are what move a job from the low end to the high end, so we price after we have seen and tested the floor.
Most two-car garages are ground, repaired and coated over one to two working days, and the timing after that depends on the system and the slab temperature. We give you a walk-on time and a drive-on time in writing, and we set both by the cure conditions in your garage rather than a fixed number of days.
No. Every floor is opened with a diamond grinder or a shot blaster, which leaves a measurable surface profile on the ICRI CSP scale. Acid etching is the method in most store kits, and it leaves an uneven, often contaminated surface that a coating cannot grip as well.
Yes, because moisture vapor coming up through a slab is the most common reason a coating lets go, and it is the first thing most coating warranties exclude. We run a plastic sheet check at minimum and move to calcium chloride or in-situ relative humidity testing when the slab or the job calls for it.
Epoxy is the thick, tough body coat that builds film and bonds to the ground slab, while polyaspartic is a fast-curing topcoat with better resistance to sunlight and abrasion. Many of our garage systems use both, with a 100% solids epoxy base and a polyaspartic clear coat over the broadcast.
No. A floor coating is not waterproofing and it does not relieve hydrostatic pressure, so active water has to be handled by drainage, a sump system or sewer work first. Once the slab is dry and tested, we can choose a system that tolerates the moisture it actually has.
Yes. Home jobs over the state threshold under the Illinois Home Repair and Remodeling Act get a written contract, and you receive the Home Repair: Know Your Consumer Rights pamphlet before any grinding starts. The contract names the products, the coats and the finished thickness.
Usually, yes. Clinics, offices, restaurants and showrooms are phased around their opening hours, with overnight and weekend work where a space cannot close, and fast-cure systems where the floor has to reopen by morning.
Sweep or dust mop grit regularly, rinse salt and brine off a garage floor through the winter, and clean with a pH-neutral cleaner rather than harsh solvents. Walk-off mats at doorways and felt pads under furniture on a basement floor do most of the remaining work.
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