Concrete Floor Stripping & Removal in El Paso TX - a bare slab ready for its next floor

Most people call us when an old coating is coming up in sheets or lifting where the car parks. Others have a slab they want to polish or recoat, and nobody remembers what went down on it years ago. If you're planning new garage floor coatings, the old layer has to come off wherever it's let go, because a new coating is only as good as what it's stuck to. The price mostly follows the size of the floor, how much of the old coating has to come off, how thick it is and whether it needs testing before anyone grinds it. The schedule turns on the same things, plus how long a test takes to come back and when your next floor is going in. The estimate puts a figure on your own slab instead of a guess.

Before we strip a whole floor, I check how much of the old coating is still holding, because sometimes a spot repair is all it needs and there's no sense grinding off a good bond. If nobody knows what the old coating is made of, we get it tested first and plan where the debris goes before the work starts. Then we pick the removal method that fits the slab and the coating and take it down to clean concrete. Grinding or blasting concrete puts crystalline silica dust into the air, and that dust causes silicosis, a lung disease with no cure, so dust control is part of the job from the first pass. We finish with cleanup and prep, so the slab is ready for whatever goes down next.

Stripping is usually the first half of a bigger job. Most homeowners have it done so they can put down new epoxy floor coatings in a garage or living space, and shops and warehouses usually follow it with commercial and industrial epoxy floor coatings built for heavy traffic. When one crew strips and recoats, the people who prepped the slab are the same ones counting on it.

The City of El Paso requires a permit to alter, repair or demolish a building or structure within its limits. Whether taking a coating off your floor falls under that isn't something we guess at, so we check with the city's Planning & Inspections office before we start. If your job needs a permit, we handle the paperwork, or we walk you through it if you're filing as the owner. Permit rules change from one city and county to the next, so on jobs in Socorro or Horizon City we check with the office that covers your address instead.

Most of the floors we strip around here are garages and shop slabs with an older coating on them, and getting that coating off the property takes planning. El Paso's Citizen Collection Stations take no construction or demolition material, household jobs included, so floor debris has to go another way. The Greater El Paso Landfill turns away regulated asbestos-containing material, regulated hazardous waste and liquid waste with free liquids in it, which is one more reason a coating nobody can name gets tested before we grind it. If it does turn out to hold asbestos, Texas DSHS, the state health department, says a single private home isn't subject to the asbestos notification rules. Disturbing asbestos-containing material in a public building is different, and the department has to be notified first. We're based in El Paso and work across the city and the cities around it in Texas and New Mexico, and if you don't see your city on our list, call and ask.