Polished Concrete Flooring in El Paso TX - your own slab as the finished floor

Most people who call about this have just pulled up carpet or tile and found plain concrete with glue lines and a few cracks, or they've got a shop slab they're tired of recoating. The price moves with the size of the room, what's stuck to the slab now, how many cracks and chipped spots need repair, and how much stone and shine you want, since showing more stone means grinding deeper. The schedule turns mostly on that prep and on whether the slab is dry enough, and when I come out I look at all of it on your floor and put it in a written estimate.

With polishing, the slab you already have becomes the finished floor, so I want to know what's in it before you pick a look. We check how hard the concrete is and how much moisture it's giving off, then polish a small spot on your own floor so you can see how much stone comes through. Next we take off whatever's on the surface, like old glue, mastic, paint or coating, and fill the cracks and chipped spots, and I'm there to check that prep before anything else happens. Then our crew grinds in stages with finer and finer heads, works in a densifier that hardens the surface, adds a guard coat and polishes up to the sheen you picked.

Polishing isn't the right answer for every slab. If yours is patched or uneven enough that bare concrete won't look the way you want, stained concrete flooring puts color into the surface instead of relying on the stone. If you love the look of exposed stone but your slab doesn't have much in it, terrazzo flooring gives you a chip pattern you choose from the start.

Cracks are the first thing I look at on a polishing job here, because a polish shows a crack plainly instead of hiding it under a coating. One El Paso contractor's guide describes the local clay and silt staying dry most of the year, then swelling fast once monsoon rain arrives, roughly July through September, and says that push and pull eventually cracks slabs. The same guide points to a crack's width, whether one side sits higher than the other, and whether it keeps moving over time as the signs that matter, and those are the three things I'd ask about on any slab before it's polished. We run into the same kind of cracking on jobs in Socorro and Horizon City, so we plan the repair before we plan the shine.

The City of El Paso requires a building permit to build, enlarge, alter, repair, move or demolish a building or change how it's used, and its One Stop Shop takes those applications. The city's list doesn't settle whether polishing an existing floor falls under that, so we check with the office that covers your address before we start, and if your job needs a permit, we handle the paperwork or walk you through it if you're filing as the owner. The city also registers residential contractors for work like alterations and foundation work, so if a permit comes into it, ask any installer whether they're registered.