Epoxy Flooring in Cheektowaga, NY

Epoxy flooring in Cheektowaga has to handle a serious winter. Buffalo Niagara International Airport sits inside the town, and the 1991 to 2020 normals recorded there average 95.4 inches of snow a year. Every one of those inches brings plows and salt, and the salt comes home on your car. By March, a typical garage floor here has spent months under puddles of brine. A coating that survives that needs a ground surface, a bonded base and a tough topcoat, and that is the kind of floor we install.

A town of 1950s concrete

Cheektowaga was mostly farmland until the subdivision boom after World War II. Census Bureau American Community Survey figures for 2019 to 2023, as published by Point2Homes, put the median year built for local housing at 1960. About 26% of homes went up in the 1950s alone, and only about 14% were built in 1980 or later. Roughly 65% of the housing units are detached single-family homes, and about 71% are owner-occupied. In practice, that means a lot of garages and basements with slabs that are six or seven decades old. Many have been painted, patched or sealed before, and some have settled or cracked. We plan around what is already on the floor.

What salt and cold do to a bare garage floor

The same normals put the average January temperature at about 25.5°F, so the slab near the garage door spends the winter swinging around freezing as cars come and go. Concrete is porous. Salty water soaks in, freezes and expands, and the top layer starts to flake. Wikipedia's article on road salt notes that salt speeds up the freeze-thaw effect on concrete and that rock salt is abrasive when used heavily. The first few feet inside the door usually show it first: pitting, scaling and white rings where puddles dried. A sealed coating keeps that brine on top, where a squeegee can push it out.

Basements and summer humidity

Buffalo's summers are humid. The normals list average relative humidity of about 68% in June and July and 72% in August. The EPA recommends keeping indoor humidity below 60%, ideally 30% to 50%, and notes that warm, humid air condenses on cold surfaces. A basement slab is one of the coldest surfaces in the house. Add moisture rising from the ground, and you get the blistering and peeling that ruin a lot of basement coatings. We test the slab before we recommend anything, and if moisture is high we use a primer rated for it or tell you the water problem has to be solved first.

A note on radon

The EPA calls radon the number one cause of lung cancer among non-smokers and lists 4 pCi/L as the level at which a home should be fixed. A floor coating covers cracks, but it is not a radon mitigation system. If you are finishing a basement, test for radon before the floor goes down.

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Coating systems we install

• Epoxy base with a protective topcoat: a thick layer that bonds well to ground concrete, finished with a topcoat that resists abrasion and chemicals.
• Flake broadcast floors: vinyl chips spread into the wet base coat until it is fully covered, which hides dirt and salt residue and gives the floor grip.
• Polyaspartic coatings: fast-curing layers that shorten downtime and can go down in a wider temperature range than standard epoxy.
• Basement systems: moisture-tolerant primers and finishes picked after a slab test.
• Crack and surface repair: filling, patching and resurfacing so the coating sits on solid concrete.
• Shop and commercial floors: heavier 100% solids systems for carts, lifts, forklifts and spills.

What an installation includes

• An on-site visit to measure and check moisture, cracks, scaling and old coatings
• Removal of old paint or failed kit coatings
• Diamond grinding across the whole floor, edges included, with dust collection
• Crack, pit and joint repair, ground flush
• Base coat, flake or color layer, and clear topcoat
• Written cure times and a winter care routine for your floor

Cheektowaga is home base, including the villages of Sloan and Depew. From here we coat floors across the Buffalo suburbs: Lancaster, Amherst, Williamsville, Eggertsville, Snyder, West Seneca, the City of Buffalo, the Town of Tonawanda, Kenmore, Orchard Park, Hamburg, Clarence, Elma, East Aurora, Alden and Lackawanna, plus Grand Island, North Tonawanda and Lockport. The housing changes as you move outward. Inner-ring areas like Cheektowaga and the Town of Tonawanda filled in with suburban housing in the 1940s and 1950s, so their slabs are older and more often painted or patched. Clarence and the southern and eastern parts of Lancaster have grown much more recently, so their concrete tends to be younger. Every one of them gets lake-effect snow and road salt. Each area page explains what we see in that community.