Concrete Crack and Floor Repair in Cheektowaga, NY

Concrete crack and floor repair is the step most coating failures skip. In Cheektowaga, the median home was built around 1960 according to 2019 to 2023 Census Bureau survey figures published by Point2Homes, so many garage and basement slabs are sixty years old or more. They have been through decades of road salt, freeze-thaw, settling and car traffic. Before we coat one, we repair cracks, scaling, spalls and broken joints so the finished floor is flat and bonded to solid concrete.

What we find on older slabs

• Scaling: the top layer has flaked off near the door and under the tires, leaving a rough, pitted surface.
• Spalls: chunks broken out around cracks, joints or where something heavy was dropped.
• Hairline cracks: fine shrinkage cracks that are common and usually stable.
• Wider cracks: cracks that have opened or have one side higher than the other.
• Broken control joints: saw-cut or tooled joints with crumbled edges.
• Old patches: past repairs in mismatched concrete that may be loose.

Why salt makes it worse here

The airport in town averages 95.4 inches of snow a year in the 1991 to 2020 normals, and every storm means salted roads. Wikipedia's road salt article notes that salt speeds up the freeze-thaw effect on concrete, and that rock salt wears concrete down when used heavily. Brine works into existing cracks and joints, freezes and pushes the edges apart. A crack that was a hairline twenty winters ago can be a broken, crumbling groove now.

How we repair

We start by grinding to find where the concrete is sound. Loose material gets chipped out until we reach solid edges. Cracks are cleaned out and filled with a rigid or semi-rigid repair material suited to the crack. Scaled and pitted areas are filled with a patching mortar or a resin-based filler. Then the repairs are ground flush with the surrounding floor. On floors with wide scaling, a thin resurfacing layer may make more sense than dozens of spot repairs.

When a crack is more than a floor problem

Some cracks point to movement in the ground or the foundation. Warning signs include a crack that keeps getting wider, one side of a crack sitting higher than the other, doors that start to stick, or water coming through. A coating will not stop that movement, and the crack will come back through the new floor. If we see those signs, we tell you, and a structural or foundation contractor is the right next call.

Repair without a coating

Most of our repair work happens as part of a coating job, because a coating protects the repair from the next round of salt. We can also repair a floor you plan to coat later, but bare repaired concrete will keep taking salt and moisture until it is sealed.

Control joints

Garage and basement slabs are usually cut into sections with joints. We can fill joints flush for a seamless look, or keep them open and honor them in the coating. Filling looks cleaner. Keeping them open gives the slab room to move. We explain the tradeoff at the estimate.